Noam Shazeer Leaves Google to Strengthen OpenAI and ChatGPT

Noam Shazeer Leaves Google to Join OpenAI

Noam Shazeer, who held the position of Vice President of Engineering at Google, has decided to leave the company to join OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT. This shift comes as OpenAI prepares to go public, marking a crucial step in its development.

Last Thursday, Shazeer announced that he would take on the role of Head of Architecture Research at OpenAI, under the leadership of Sam Altman. In a message posted on the social network X, he expressed pride in the work accomplished at Google and excitement for the new challenges that await him at OpenAI.

An Enthusiastic Welcome at OpenAI

Noam Shazeer's arrival at OpenAI has been met with great enthusiasm. Mark Chen, one of the company's executives, praised his significant contributions in the field of Transformer architectures and Mixture of Experts, calling him one of the foremost experts in general artificial intelligence.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, expressed his satisfaction at finally being able to collaborate with Shazeer, a partnership he had long hoped for. Altman stated, "Noam is one of the people I've most wanted to work with since the very beginning of OpenAI. It only took 10 years. I think it will be worth it!"

Noam Shazeer's Impressive Journey

Noam Shazeer is a historic figure in the realm of modern artificial intelligence. He played a key role in the development of AdSense and co-authored the foundational paper "Attention Is All You Need" in 2017, which introduced the Transformer architecture. This architecture is now at the heart of many generative AIs.

Shazeer joined Google in 2000, and his departure is particularly significant as it comes less than two years after his return to the company. Indeed, Shazeer is also the co-founder of Character.AI, a startup that Google acquired for $2.7 billion in 2024. This acquisition marked his return to Google, along with part of his research team.

Shortly after his return, he was appointed to lead the development of Gemini, a strategic project for Google, where he played a crucial role in the competition against ChatGPT. His expertise has been instrumental in accelerating the evolution of Google's AI models at a time when competition in the sector is particularly intense.