Noam Shazeer
Noam Shazeer is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur who is joining OpenAI after serving as a vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of the Gemini AI project. He is best known as one of the lead authors of the seminal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the transformer architecture that underpins modern large language models. He previously spent over twenty years at Google, where he contributed to projects including the spelling corrector for Google Search and the Meena chatbot, before co-founding Character.AI in 2021 and returning to Google in 2024 as part of a $2.7 billion licensing deal. In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
“After the market learned that John Jumper... was leaving for Anthropic... after Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI, it sent Alphabet's shares tumbling as much as 7%.”
“Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI, marking Google's second major AI researcher departure in a week after John Jumper left for Anthropic.”
AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.