Overview
- Noam Shazeer confirmed on X that he is leaving Google/DeepMind to join OpenAI and OpenAI leaders publicly welcomed his arrival.
- OpenAI research staff, including Mark Chen, said Shazeer will serve as an architecture research lead focused on model design innovations.
- Shazeer is a co-author of the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer and helped pioneer sparsely gated Mixture-of-Experts and the Switch Transformer, technologies used to scale models and cut inference cost.
- Shazeer left Google in 2021 to co‑found Character.AI, returned to Google in 2024 under a reported technology licensing and rehiring deal, and his latest move reverses that return while reports note the earlier deal was described as worth about $2.7 billion.
- Industry observers say the hire is a material talent loss for Google’s Gemini effort and an operational and technical gain for OpenAI that could affect future model architecture choices and engineering priorities.