The man who co-invented the transformer is leaving Google for OpenAI

Noam Shazeer, a VP of engineering at Google and a co-lead on Gemini, said on 18 June he is leaving to join OpenAI. Shazeer is one of the eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need", the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture now sitting under every frontier model, his old employer's and his new one's alike.

The number that frames it: Google only brought him back in August 2024, through a roughly US$2.7bn licensing deal with Character.AI, the startup he had left Google to found and run as CEO. Less than two years later that retention is undone. His new title was not in the announcement, though several outlets report a role steering OpenAI's core model architecture.

Talent at this level rarely moves quietly. Shazeer crossing to an IPO-bound OpenAI is both a research signal and a reminder that the people who built the current paradigm remain the scarcest input in it, and the most expensive to keep.