Two years after a $2.7 billion return to Google, AI pioneer Noam Shazeer is leaving for OpenAI
Shazeer, who is behind Character.AI, departs Google again, intensifying the rivalry between the industry's biggest players.
Noam Shazeer, Google's Vice President of Engineering and one of the leaders of the company's Gemini AI project, has announced that he is leaving Google to join OpenAI.
"I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there," Shazeer wrote in a post on X. "It was a difficult decision to move on. I’m incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you."
This is Shazeer's second departure from Google. The first came in 2021, when he left alongside Daniel De Freitas to co-found AI startup Character.AI. The pair returned to Google in August 2024 as part of a reported $2.7 billion deal between Google and Character.AI. The startup became known for allowing users to chat with AI-generated versions of celebrities, fictional characters, and custom-built virtual assistants.
Following his return, Shazeer was appointed co-lead of the Gemini AI model development effort and became one of the central figures behind Google's push to close the gap with OpenAI's ChatGPT.
His departure underscores the increasingly fierce competition for top AI talent, which has become one of the most important battlegrounds in the race to develop advanced artificial intelligence systems.
The move comes only weeks after Google unveiled new Gemini products and as OpenAI is preparing for a future public offering.
Shazeer originally joined Google in 2000 and is best known as one of the co-authors of the landmark 2017 research paper Attention Is All You Need, which laid the foundation for modern generative AI and is widely regarded as a catalyst for the current AI boom.
Google acknowledged his departure in a statement, saying: "We are grateful for Noam's meaningful contributions to Google over the years."
The timing of Shazeer's departure was not immediately clear.
