Gemini Co-Lead Noam Shazeer Leaves Google for OpenAI

TL;DR: Noam Shazeer — co-author of "Attention Is All You Need" and Google's Gemini co-lead — is joining OpenAI, 18 months after Google spent $2.7B to bring him back from Character.AI.

Shazeer co-wrote the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture underpinning virtually every LLM today. Google brought him back from Character.AI in a high-profile 2024 deal and made him VP of Engineering with responsibility for Gemini. His announcement was brief: "I'm excited to share that I'll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there."

Why it matters: The co-lead of Gemini moving to the team building GPT-5.5 is the clearest public signal of where top AI researchers currently see the most consequential model work — and it intensifies competition between the labs whose models power the tools you use daily.

Sources: Bloomberg, The Next Web, 9to5Google