Noam Shazeer, the engineer who co-invented the Transformer architecture underpinning virtually every major AI model today, announced on June 18, 2026, that he is leaving Google to join OpenAI — less than two years after Google paid approximately $2.7 billion to bring him back via its Character.AI licensing deal.
Key Highlights
- Shazeer co-authored "Attention Is All You Need" (2017), the foundational Transformer paper behind GPT, Claude, LLaMA, and Gemini
- Google paid roughly $2.7 billion to re-acquire him through the Character.AI deal in August 2024
- He rejoined as VP of Engineering and Gemini co-lead, tasked with closing the gap against ChatGPT
- With his departure, all 8 original Transformer paper authors have now left Google
- He joins OpenAI ahead of its anticipated IPO, in one of the most significant talent moves in AI history
Details
Shazeer confirmed the decision in a post on X, writing: "I'm excited to share that I'll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there. It was a difficult decision to move on. I'm incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we've built together."
He returned to Google in August 2024 under a licensing arrangement that valued Character.AI's technology and research team at approximately $2.7 billion. His personal payout from that deal was estimated at between $750 million and $1 billion, based on his 30-40% ownership stake in Character.AI. In early 2026, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, a recognition of his foundational contributions to the field.
Impact
The departure is a significant setback for Google's AI program. Shazeer was central to Gemini's technical roadmap and research direction. His move to OpenAI intensifies an already fierce competition for elite AI talent, particularly as OpenAI is reported to be preparing for a major IPO.
A symbolic milestone accompanies the news: with Shazeer's exit, all eight co-authors of the original Transformer paper have now departed Google. That 2017 paper described an attention-based architecture that became the technical foundation for GPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, and virtually every large language model in use today.
"All 8 authors of the original transformer paper have officially left Google," noted one widely-shared X post. "$2.7B spent just to have 0 of them left in the end."
Background
Shazeer joined Google in 2000 as one of its earliest engineers, contributing to search spelling correction and AdSense before moving into AI research. He was a core contributor to the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper and independently invented key architectural improvements including multi-query attention and SwiGLU activations, both widely adopted in modern models.
In 2021, he left Google after the company declined to release Meena, an advanced conversational AI chatbot he had developed, citing safety and reputational concerns. He co-founded Character.AI with Daniel De Freitas, scaling it to over 20 million monthly active users. Google's 2024 acquisition of the company's technology and team brought him back as VP Engineering.
What's Next
Shazeer's arrival at OpenAI is expected to strengthen its research and engineering capabilities ahead of what many anticipate will be a pivotal period in the AI race. For Google, the challenge now is retaining momentum on Gemini and rebuilding key research leadership without one of its most storied engineers.
The talent competition across the AI industry — between Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta AI, and independent labs — continues to intensify as each organization races toward more capable and autonomous AI systems.
Source: CNBC