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Transformer Co-Author Noam Shazeer Moves From Google to OpenAI

June 17, 2026 at 23:24 EDT

Recruiting & HR
Foundation Models
Funding & M&A

Noam Shazeer, a co-lead of Google's Gemini, said on June 17, 2026 that he will leave Google to join OpenAI. The move of a prominent researcher behind the Transformer architecture underscores the intensifying competition for AI talent.

June 17, 2026 · AI Talent Watch

Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer leaves Google for OpenAI

The "Attention Is All You Need" co-author — rehired by Google in 2024 in a ~$2.7B deal — departs to lead architecture research at OpenAI, in one of the year's biggest AI talent moves.

From

Google

Gemini co-lead, VP Engineering

→

OpenAI

Lead, architecture research

~$2.7B

Value of Google's 2024 rehire deal (incl. Character.AI tech license)

2000

Year he first joined Google — a long-tenured veteran

10 yrs

How long Altman says he has wanted to work with Shazeer

Foundational work that shaped modern AI

Transformer (2017)

"Attention Is All You Need" co-author

Text-to-text framework

Switch Transformer

Scaling sparse models

Sparse MoE

Efficient mixture-of-experts

A landmark catch

Seen as one of the year's most significant AI talent moves. OpenAI praises his work on transformers, MoE, and efficient decoding as having "shaped modern AI."

An open question

Google loses the researcher it spent heavily to rehire — and what Shazeer will deliver at OpenAI is still to be seen.

The wider talent war

OpenAI, Google, and xAI are competing for frontline researchers with packages reported to exceed $20M a year plus accelerated equity grants — as OpenAI is also said to be preparing for an IPO.

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