Noam Shazeer, Google’s vice president of engineering and a technical lead on the company’s Gemini AI project, announced on June 18, 2026 that he is joining OpenAI. In a post on X, Shazeer wrote, “I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there,” adding that “it was a difficult decision to move on” and that he was “incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together.”
Shazeer’s departure comes less than two years after Google spent about $2.7 billion to license technology from Character.AI and bring him back to the company in 2024. Reports at the time estimated Shazeer owned roughly 30–40% of Character.AI; the deal was said to have earned him between $750 million and $1 billion.
A long-time figure in AI research, Shazeer began at Google in 2000 as a software engineer, contributing to search spelling correction. He co-authored the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the transformer architecture that underpins modern large language models including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
Shazeer also led work on Google’s Meena chatbot before leaving in 2021 with colleague Daniel de Freitas to co-found Character.AI, a fast-growing chatbot startup. Time magazine named him among the 100 most influential people in AI in 2023. In 2026 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, one of the profession’s highest honors.
The move shifts a high-profile engineer from Google to OpenAI at a time of intense competition among leading AI labs. Shazeer’s experience with transformer research, large-scale chatbots and product development positions him as a significant hire for OpenAI, and his return to the broader startup-and-corporate AI ecosystem will be closely watched by industry observers.
Original Source: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/who-is-noam-shazeer-ai-pioneer-behind-gemini-now-joining-openai-11653162#publisher=newsstand
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Publish Date: 2026-06-18 12:57:00
