Noam Shazeer, co-author of the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, announced he is leaving Google DeepMind to join OpenAI. The move ranks among the highest-profile talent departures in AI industry history.
Shazeer was serving as vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini artificial intelligence models when he announced the June 2026 departure. In a post on X, he wrote: “I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there.”
The Transformer architecture that Shazeer helped invent underpins virtually every major large language model today, including GPT, Gemini, and Claude. His departure represents a significant vote of confidence in OpenAI’s research direction.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Shazeer “one of the people I have most wanted to work with since the very beginning of OpenAI.” Google had reportedly paid approximately $2.7 billion to bring Shazeer back from Character.AI less than two years prior.
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