Noam Shazeer, Gemini co lead and Google VP, joins OpenAI
Big news in the AI world: Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini artificial intelligence models, is moving to OpenAI, the team behind ChatGPT.
This switch comes as leading AI firms compete for talent while racing to develop advanced models.
Noam Shazeer rejoined Google via $2.7B
Shazeer joined Google in 2000 and was a co-author of a seminal 2017 research paper that catalyzed the AI boom.
He is the former head of startup Character. AI before returning to Google with his research team in a $2.7 billion deal and was appointed to co-lead the development of its Gemini AI model in 2024.
As he leaves, Shazeer says he's proud of what he built at Google and excited for what's next at OpenAI.
Google thanked him for his "meaningful contributions."