Breaking

Gemini Co-Lead Noam Shazeer Leaves Google to Join OpenAI

June 17, 2026 at 23:49 EDT

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Recruiting & HR
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Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the Transformer paper and Google DeepMind's VP of Engineering and co-lead of Gemini, is leaving Google to join rival OpenAI, multiple reports confirmed around June 18, 2026. The departure of such a prominent researcher is drawing attention amid a multibillion-dollar race to build the most powerful AI models.

June 2026 · AI Talent War

A Transformer Pioneer Leaves Google for OpenAI

Noam Shazeer — co-author of "Attention Is All You Need" and co-lead of Google's Gemini — is departing for rival OpenAI, less than two years after his costly return. A major blow to Alphabet in the multibillion-dollar race for the most powerful AI models.

$2.7B

Licensing deal that brought him back to Google in 2024

~$1B

Personal gain reported from that deal

<2 yrs

Between his return and this departure

A Back-and-Forth Career

2017

Co-authors "Attention Is All You Need"

Introduces the Transformer — the foundation of modern generative AI

2021

Leaves Google to co-found Character.AI

Grows to ~20M users and a $1B+ valuation

2024

Returns to Google via ~$2.7B licensing deal

Becomes co-lead of Gemini

Jun 2026

Leaves Google to join OpenAI

New role not yet disclosed

The Technologies He Helped Build

Core architectures underpinning today's large language models.

Transformer Mixture-of-Experts T5 Switch Transformer Multi-Query Attention SwiGLU

Gain for OpenAI

A Transformer and MoE expert expected to drive next-generation model development, valued for conversational AI and scalable MoE implementation.

Loss for Google

Called one of the most significant talent shifts in AI history — a setback for Gemini development amid an intensifying Big Tech talent war.

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