Gemini Co-Lead Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

Noam Shazeer co-authored the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need” with a Google research team, laying the technical foundation for Transformers and modern large language models. He left Google in 2021 to found Character.AI, before returning with his team under a licensing and talent deal worth about $2.7 billion in 2024. He subsequently became a co-lead of Gemini.

Shazeer announced on X on June 17, 2026, that he was leaving Google to join OpenAI. OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen said Shazeer would lead research into AI architectures. The move comes less than two years after Google spent $2.7 billion to bring him back and leaves the company facing the loss of a key talent as competition among Gemini and rival models intensifies.