Noam Shazeer, Google Gemini Co-Lead and Transformer Co-Creator, Departs for OpenAI After Google Spent $2.7B to Rehire Him

Noam Shazeer, Google's VP of Engineering and co-lead of the Gemini model family, confirmed his departure to join OpenAI on June 18 after just two years back at the company Google paid $2.7 billion to rehire through the 2024 Character.AI licensing deal. Shazeer co-authored the 2017 'Attention Is All You Need' paper that introduced the Transformer architecture underlying every major frontier AI system today—ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude alike. He announced the move via X without specifying a title; The Information reported he will lead architecture research at OpenAI, depriving Google of the researcher most central to Gemini's technical foundations.