Legendary researcher in the field of artificial intelligence and core author of the Transformer architecture, Noam Shazeer, has officially announced his joining of OpenAI. Previously, major AI giants engaged in intense competition to secure this top talent, and OpenAI ultimately succeeded in attracting him.
This change has drawn widespread attention in the technology community, as just under two years ago, Google had spent approximately $2.7 billion to bring him back through a technology licensing agreement. However, less than two years later, this top scholar, known by colleagues as the "wizard," chose to leave Google again.
The Mathematical Genius' Legendary Journey at Google
Noam Shazeer's technical career is legendary. He won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad with a perfect score. He joined the company when Google had around 200 employees, and he made foundational contributions to Google's spelling correction for search engines and advertising systems.
His most outstanding achievement was co-authoring the groundbreaking paper "Attention Is All You Need" in 2017, which first introduced the Transformer architecture. He is widely regarded as the one who contributed the most to this paper, inventing almost all the key core technologies used in modern large models.
The Behind-the-Scenes Battle for Talent Among Tech Giants
This is Shazeer's second departure from Google. In 2021, he left the company due to Google's refusal to release a chatbot he developed, and he started his own company, Character.AI. Subsequently, in 2024, Google spent a huge amount of money to reach a technology agreement to bring him back and appointed him as the technical lead for the Gemini project.
With Shazeer's return, all eight authors of the original Transformer paper have now left Google, with two of them choosing to join OpenAI. His joining will undoubtedly inject strong R&D momentum into OpenAI, and it also shifts the balance of talent between the two AI giants once again.
