Google Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer leaves for OpenAI
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Noam Shazeer, Google’s vice president of engineering and co-head of Gemini AI models, announced Wednesday that he is leaving the company to join OpenAI.
“I am excited to share that I will be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the incredible team there,” said Shazeer. said in a post on X.
“It was a difficult decision to move on. I’m incredibly proud of the great team at Google and everything we’ve built together. It’s been an honor and pleasure to work with all of you,” he added.
Shazeer’s departure comes less than two years after his return to Google. In August 2024, Google brought Shazeer and fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas back to its DeepMind AI unit as part of a partnership with Character.AI, the startup the duo founded after leaving Google in 2021.
The duo left Google after it refused to aggressively pursue a chatbot project they championed. They later founded Character.AI, one of the most prominent artificial intelligence startups.
The latest move underscores the intense scramble for top artificial intelligence talent, which has become a key front in the competition between technology companies.
This departure comes weeks after Google announced new AI products at its annual I/O developer conference, including the Gemini 3.5 Flash model and the Gemini Spark AI agent.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI confidentially filed for an initial public offering earlier this month, setting the stage for one of the most closely watched tech listings in recent years.
— CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
