Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini AI project, announced on June 18, 2026, that he is leaving the company to join OpenAI.
A Pioneer of Modern AI
Shazeer is one of the eight co-authors of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the transformer architecture that now underlies virtually every major large language model in use today. His departure marks one of the most significant talent shifts in the AI industry this year.
Google paid approximately $2.7 billion in 2024 to acquire his startup Character.AI and bring Shazeer and his team back to the company, less than two years before this exit was announced. He had spent that period co-leading the Gemini project before making the decision to move to OpenAI.
The Battle for Top Talent
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that Shazeer is someone he had wanted to work with since the very beginning of OpenAI, calling the move a long-anticipated development.
The departure intensifies the ongoing competition between the two labs for foundational AI research talent, particularly as both OpenAI and Anthropic are reported to be preparing for potential initial public offerings in the coming year.
Shazeer’s move follows a broader pattern of senior researchers moving between major AI laboratories. His role at OpenAI has not been publicly specified.
