Google Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer leaves Alphabet to join OpenAI

Noam Shazeer, vice president of engineering at Google and a co-leader of its Gemini AI models, announced on Wednesday that he is leaving Alphabet to join OpenAI. Shazeer had returned to Google in January 2024 as part of the company's $2.7 billion deal for Character.AI — a structure known in the industry as a reverse acquihire.

In an internal note, Google CEO Sundar Pichai called Shazeer "an exceptional engineer" whose contributions had shaped the foundations of Gemini. At OpenAI, Sam Altman wrote on X that Shazeer was "one of the most influential researchers in the history of AI". Shazeer was a co-author of the seminal 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper that introduced the transformer architecture.

Alphabet shares (GOOGL) fell about 1.4% in pre-market trading. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called the move "a big win for OpenAI" but said he did not expect a material disruption to Google's Gemini roadmap given the team's depth. Goldman Sachs warned the transfer would likely push senior generative-AI compensation packages higher across the sector.