Monday Jun 22
DEALSOpenAI

Shazeer Leaves Google For OpenAI

18JUN
$2.7B WALKSGOOGLEOPENAI

The man who co-wrote the Transformer paper just quit Google. Noam Shazeer, Gemini co-lead, joins OpenAI to run architecture research. Google paid $2.7B to bring him back in 2024.

Here is why it lands hard. He is one of the few whose inventions sit inside every model. Multi-Query Attention, the speed trick that makes serving them affordable, is his.

He returned from a startup he co-founded, on a deal worth billions. Less than two years later, he walked away. Altman says he hunted this hire for ten years.

His mandate now: shape the core design that decides what the next models can do. The rival he left keeps shipping without the one who knew its weak spots.

full brief & sources

⚡ Why this matters

  • Reverses the talent flow. The biggest names had been leaving for Anthropic, not OpenAI.
  • OpenAI is arming its next model family right before a planned IPO.
  • Google loses deep knowledge of Gemini's architecture to a direct rival.

🔍 What happened

  • Shazeer posted his exit on X just after midnight Pacific, June 18.
  • He was VP of engineering and co-lead of Gemini at Google.
  • Google paid ~$2.7B in 2024 to bring him back from Character.AI.
  • He joins OpenAI as Lead for Architecture Research.
  • Altman: he is one of the people Altman most wanted to work with since OpenAI's start.

💬 Smart takes

  • Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO): "Only took 10 years. I think it will be worth the wait."
  • Windows News source: Google's Gemini team was "shell-shocked" by the exit.
  • Skeptic: One architect doesn't ship a model. Gemini 3.5 Pro was built by a large team and launches on schedule.

🧭 Where this goes

  1. LikelyOpenAI leans on Shazeer's sparse mixture-of-experts work for its next model family.
  2. Likelymore senior Google DeepMind researchers field OpenAI offers this quarter.
  3. PossibleGoogle counters with a retention package and a named architecture lead.
  4. Wild CardShazeer's exit slips the next-gen Gemini Nova generation by two quarters.

🥄 The Spoon Take

The talent war just flipped direction. For months it was researchers leaving OpenAI for Anthropic. Now OpenAI lands the architect almost every frontier model is built on. Right before its IPO, that signals where the next edge comes from: better structure, not just more scale.

🤔 Pushback

A single hire rarely changes a model's trajectory, and Shazeer's recent output is less visible than his 2017-era work.

·CNBC - Shazeer leaves for OpenAI·TechTimes - $2.7B Google hire jumps·Neowin - Gemini co-lead departs