OpenAI has added another prominent name to its research team. Noam Shazeer, one of the engineers behind Google’s Gemini models and a key contributor to the Transformer architecture, is joining the company after years at Google.
Shazeer shared the news on social media, saying he was excited about the next chapter while also thanking his former colleagues at Google for the work they had done together.
His departure comes as a setback for Google, where he served as Vice President of Engineering and helped guide the development of Gemini, the company’s flagship AI model family.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman welcomed the move, saying he had wanted to work with Shazeer since OpenAI’s early days and was pleased that it had finally happened.
Shazeer is widely known for helping shape some of the technologies that power today’s AI systems. He was among the authors of the influential 2017 research paper Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the Transformer architecture used by modern large language models.
Over the years, he also worked on several major AI projects, including LaMDA, PaLM, Gemini, and Mixture-of-Experts systems that helped improve model efficiency and performance.
The move is especially notable because Google spent billions to bring Shazeer back in 2024. Before that, he had left the company in 2021 after Google chose not to release a chatbot project he had developed with fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas.
The pair later launched Character.AI, which quickly attracted millions of users and became one of the most talked-about AI startups. In 2024, Google signed a deal worth around $2.7 billion to license Character.AI technology and rehire Shazeer along with several members of his team.
After returning, he became one of the leading figures working on Gemini’s technical development alongside some of Google’s top AI researchers.
His switch to OpenAI highlights how fiercely major AI companies are competing for top talent. OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic have all been investing heavily in researchers and engineers as the race to build stronger AI models continues.
The hiring comes as OpenAI expands its research efforts and looks ahead to its next stage of growth.
