SAN FRANCISCO, June 18, 2026, 01:24 PDT
- OpenAI has recruited Noam Shazeer, currently a vice president at Google and co-lead of Gemini, to join its research team.
- Shazeer returned to Google under the Character.AI deal, which was valued at $2.7 billion, less than two years ago.
- The race for top AI model builders is heating up as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta all chase the same pool of talent.
Google’s vice president of engineering Noam Shazeer, who co-led development of the company’s Gemini AI models, said Wednesday he’s leaving to join OpenAI. Shazeer is one of Google’s top AI researchers. He will move to the ChatGPT maker, according to Reuters.
Shazeer is taking on a bigger role in model architecture, the key design work behind training and scaling large AI models. Mark Chen, OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer, said Shazeer is now “lead for architecture research” at the company. Techmeme
The announcement comes as OpenAI heads toward an initial public offering and Google pushes to keep Gemini in front of competing models. Bloomberg called Shazeer’s move a win for OpenAI as it competes with Anthropic to develop stronger AI systems.
Shazeer said on X that it was “exciting” to join OpenAI but called leaving Google a “difficult decision,” according to Business Insider. He also wrote he was proud of the team at Google and what it had built. Business Insider
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reacted to the news in a post, calling Shazeer one of the people he’d wanted to work with since the start of OpenAI. “Only took 10 years,” Altman wrote. Business Insider
Chen cited Shazeer’s work on transformers, mixture-of-experts systems, and efficient decoding, and said those had “shaped modern AI.” Mixture of experts, or MoE, is a type of model that splits up tasks for different submodels. That setup can cut compute needs and make responses faster. Digg
Google issued a brief statement to Reuters, saying, “We are grateful for Noam’s meaningful contributions to Google over the years.” The company did not say when he left. Reuters
Google faces an awkward situation. The company brought Shazeer back in 2024 from Character.AI, the chatbot startup he co-founded, in a deal worth $2.7 billion, according to The Information and others. Shazeer then took a technical lead post on Gemini, working on pretraining, when the model begins learning patterns from big datasets.
Shazeer started at Google back in 2000 and later helped write “Attention Is All You Need,” the well-known 2017 paper introducing the transformer model. The transformer has become a core part of today’s chatbots and other AI tools. Google Research shows him as one of the paper’s authors. Google Research
OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic have all been chasing top researchers and engineers with big pay and acqui-hire deals, Business Insider reported. That’s the market Shazeer is stepping back into. The battle is bigger than just Google and OpenAI.
One hire isn’t the finish line in the AI model race. Back in 2024, Google put Shazeer in as a Gemini technical lead, according to Reuters, and said he’d be working alongside other leaders like Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals. Google has Gemini going into products like Search and Pixel phones. With that reach, Google can take a hit if someone leaves—the loss could slow some parts of the next model push, but it doesn’t tip the whole boat.
