I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there.
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…
— Noam Shazeer (@NoamShazeer) June 18, 2026
Noam Shazeer announced that he will be joining OpenAI. Shazeer shared the news in a post, saying he is excited to join OpenAI and looks forward to working with the company’s team.
The move marks another major AI talent shift in the technology industry, as companies continue competing for researchers and engineers with deep experience building large-scale AI systems.
Shazeer is one of the most influential figures in modern artificial intelligence. He is widely known as a co-author of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture that became foundational to modern large language models.
His background at Google dates back to 2000, where he spent many years working on machine learning, natural language processing, and large-scale AI systems.
During his earlier tenure at Google, Shazeer contributed to several major AI efforts and became one of the company’s best-known AI researchers. He also worked on systems connected to conversational AI and large language model development, including Google’s broader work around LaMDA and later Gemini.
Shazeer left Google in 2021 and co-founded Character.AI, a chatbot startup focused on personalized AI characters and conversational systems.
He later returned to Google in 2024 as part of a major agreement involving Character.AI technology and talent. After returning, Shazeer became a vice president of engineering and co-lead of Google’s Gemini AI models.
His departure from Google to join OpenAI comes less than two years after his return and underscores the continued importance of top AI researchers in shaping the competitive direction of the industry.
For OpenAI, Shazeer’s arrival adds a researcher and builder with experience across foundational model architecture, consumer-facing AI products, and large-scale AI infrastructure.
For Google, the move represents the exit of one of its most prominent AI leaders at a time when Gemini remains central to the company’s AI strategy.
