Noam Shazeer, a co-lead for Google's Gemini models, has joined OpenAI after a two-year stint at the company. Shazeer, who previously co-authored the influential 'Attention Is All You Need' paper, was part of Google's efforts to improve its reasoning capabilities. His departure comes after a return to Google in 2024, where he worked on enhancing the company's AI models. The move has been described as one of the most significant AI talent transfers of the year.
Shazeer joined Google in 2000, contributing to the development of the search engine's spell checker. He left in 2021 to co-found the AI chatbot startup Character.AI. His return to Google in 2024 was part of a $2.7 billion deal that also brought back co-founder Daniel De Freitas and parts of the research team. The goal was to strengthen Google's reasoning models, which have not yet matched the capabilities of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Shazeer's decision to leave Google was described as a difficult one. He wrote on X, 'It was a difficult decision to move on.' His move to OpenAI is being compared to Andrej Karpathy's recent joining of Anthropic. The shift highlights the ongoing competition among major AI firms for top talent.
Source: thedecoder
