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Noam Shazeer, the AI researcher Google brought back through a deal worth roughly $2.7 billion (4 trillion won), has left the company to join OpenAI — less than two years after returning to Google, deepening concerns about talent drain at the tech giant amid the generative AI race.
According to Bloomberg and other media, Shazeer recently departed Google and joined OpenAI. He announced the move himself on June 17 through his social media accounts.
OpenAI also confirmed the hire. Mark Chen, OpenAI's chief research officer, said Shazeer "will be researching how to develop next-generation AI models," while CEO Sam Altman called him "someone I've wanted to work with since the very early days."
Shazeer is widely regarded as one of the researchers who most shaped the development of generative AI. In 2017, he co-authored the landmark paper "Attention Is All You Need" alongside other Google researchers — the work that laid the foundation for the Transformer architecture now used in virtually all modern generative AI models.
Shazeer later left Google to co-found AI chatbot startup Character.AI. He returned to Google in 2024 as part of a $2.7 billion deal that involved licensing Character.AI's technology — a transaction widely seen as primarily a vehicle to bring Shazeer back.
The Wall Street Journal described the arrangement at the time as "a license in name only," saying its real purpose was to secure Shazeer.
His move to rival OpenAI in under two years has renewed questions about Google's ability to retain AI leadership.
The talent exodus extends beyond Shazeer. On June 19, John Jumper, a vice president at Google's DeepMind AI research unit, announced on X that he was leaving after nine years to join Anthropic.
Jumper was a lead developer of AlphaFold, the AI system for predicting protein structures, and shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.
Industry observers say the generative AI competition has expanded beyond technology development into an all-out battle for top research talent. With OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and other major players aggressively recruiting elite researchers, analysts say the balance of power in the AI industry may ultimately hinge on which company attracts the most talent.
rainbow@heraldcorp.com
