Google Gemini Co-Lead Noam Shazeer Leaves for OpenAI
The veteran AI researcher, who returned to Google in 2024 through the Character.AI partnership, said he will join OpenAI.
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Image Credit- Chetan Jha/ MIT Sloan Management Review India
Noam Shazeer, Google’s vice president of engineering and one of the leaders behind the company’s Gemini family of AI models, said he will leave the company to join OpenAI, marking another high-profile talent move in the artificial intelligence industry.
Shazeer announced the move in a post on X on Wednesday.
“I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there,” Shazeer wrote.
He also described the decision to leave Google as difficult.
“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,” Shazeer said.
The move comes less than two years after Shazeer returned to Google. In August 2024, Google signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Character.AI, the chatbot startup Shazeer co-founded with Daniel De Freitas after leaving Google in 2021.
As part of that arrangement, Shazeer, De Freitas and some members of Character.AI’s research team moved to Google DeepMind. Character.AI remained a separate company.
Shazeer’s return was seen as an important addition to Google’s AI effort. He had earlier worked on LaMDA and was also a co-author of the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper, widely regarded as one of the foundations of the current generative AI boom.
At Google, Shazeer helped lead Gemini, the company’s flagship family of AI models built to compete with systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and other major AI developers.
His exit comes as Google is pushing deeper into AI across search, consumer apps, enterprise products and developer tools. At its I/O developer conference in May, the company announced Gemini 3.5 Flash and Gemini Spark, a personal AI agent designed to take action on users’ behalf under their direction.
The move also points to the continuing battle for senior AI researchers as major technology companies compete for people capable of building and improving frontier models. Top researchers have become central to the AI race, alongside computing power, data and distribution.
For OpenAI, Shazeer adds another prominent researcher as the company expands beyond ChatGPT into enterprise AI, coding tools, agents and broader model development.
