Google, who spent $2.7 billion to bring back the legendary researcher, sees him leave for the second time.
Just now, the core author of Transformer, Noam Shazeer, announced joining OpenAI.
The last time, in 2021, he left to start his own venture after Google refused to release the chatbot he developed.
In 2024, Google spent approximately $2.7 billion to sign a technology licensing agreement with Character.AI to bring him back.
In less than two years, this researcher, referred to as a "wizard" by colleagues, has chosen to leave once again.
After expressing his intention to resign, both OpenAI and Musk's xAI participated in the competition, with several of the most influential companies in the AI industry vying for this individual.
Ultraman stated that he is one of the people he most wants to collaborate with.
Thus, Google has had this person twice, and lost him twice.
From Math Genius to Google Legend
Noam Shazeer was born in 1976 in Philadelphia. His father, Dov Shazeer, was a math teacher who later became an engineer.
His mathematical talent showed at a very young age.
In 1994, while still in high school, Shazeer represented the United States in the International Mathematical Olympiad, scoring a perfect 42 points to win the gold medal and helping the U.S. team achieve a historic record of all six team members scoring full marks in that competition.
In the fall of the same year, he entered Duke University to study mathematics and computer science. In his first semester of freshman year, he completed two 200-level math courses and ranked sixth nationally in the prestigious Putnam Mathematical Competition for Undergraduates.
He then led the Duke University math team to win the Putnam Team Competition and the runner-up in 1996 and 1997 respectively. After completing his undergraduate studies, he entered the University of California, Berkeley for graduate school but did not complete his degree.
In 2000, Shazeer joined Google when the entire company had only about 200 employees.
He has made several iconic technical contributions:
He improved Google's search engine spelling correction system and also wrote the core algorithm that later became Google AdSense.
2017 was truly a transformative year when Shazeer, as one of the main authors, co-authored the groundbreaking paper "Attention Is All You Need," which first introduced the Transformer architecture.
Among the eight co-authors, he was widely regarded as the most significant contributor, having invented or co-invented almost all the major architectures and technologies used in modern large-scale language models: from the Transformer itself to the Mixture of Experts.
In September 2023, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the field of AI.
In February 2026, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States.
Two Departures, One Google
Shazeer's first departure from Google was in 2021.
Internally at Google, he and his colleague Daniel De Freitas developed an advanced chatbot named Meena, which later evolved into LaMDA.
They proposed multiple times to senior management to release it to the public, but were repeatedly rejected, just two years before OpenAI stunned the world with similar technology through ChatGPT.
Ultimately, Shazeer and De Freitas chose to leave Google and co-founded Character.AI.
This platform allows users to freely converse with AI personalities such as historical figures and virtual characters. At one point, the platform had over 20 million monthly active users, with an average usage time of about 2 hours, making it one of the most popular AI applications beyond ChatGPT.
In August 2024, Google brought Shazeer back with a $2.7 billion technology licensing agreement. With his ownership of approximately 30% to 40% of Character.AI, his personal gains from this deal are estimated to be between $750 million and $1 billion.
Upon his return, he served as the technical lead for the Gemini project alongside Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals.
Under his leadership, Gemini 3 reached the top of multiple rankings, even prompting Sam Altman to sound the "red alert" within OpenAI.
However, he also stirred up some controversy during his time at Google. He clashed with colleagues over personal views expressed on an internal Google forum. Forum administrators removed him from the involved internal communication channels, and his then-boss Jeff Dean publicly criticized him.
This time, Shazeer has announced his departure from Google once again to join OpenAI.
OpenAI has internally notified its employees of this news on Wednesday.
His wording in the post was restrained and brief, only saying, "This was a difficult decision," along with expressions of gratitude to the Google team.
With this move, all eight authors of the Transformer paper have now finally left Google, with two of them finding a new home at OpenAI, with Lukasz Kaiser having joined earlier.
The last exodus of the eight authors was referred to as "one of the largest talent and intellectual property losses in corporate history."
And Shazeer is the only one among them who was once lured back by Google with a multi-billion dollar deal.
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