WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Noam Shazeer, Vice President of Engineering at Alphabet Inc. (GOOG)-owned Google and one of the key leaders behind the company's Gemini AI project, has announced his decision to leave the company to join OpenAI.
'I'm excited to share that I'll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there,' Shazeer first announced his decision in a post on X.
'It was a difficult decision to move on. I'm incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we've built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you.'
This marks Shazeer's second exit from Google. In 2021, he left the company with Daniel De Freitas to start AI company Character.AI. The startup became popular for allowing users to chat with AI-powered versions of celebrities, fictional characters, and custom virtual assistants.
In August 2024, Shazeer and De Freitas returned to Google as part of a reported $2.7 billion agreement between Google and Character.AI. After rejoining, Shazeer became a co-leader of the Gemini AI project and played an important role in Google's efforts to compete with ChatGPT.
Google acknowledged his departure by stating that, 'We are grateful for Noam's meaningful contributions to Google over the years.'
Shazeer first joined Google in 2000 and is widely known as one of the co-authors of the influential 2017 research paper Attention Is All You Need. The paper introduced the transformer architecture, which became the foundation of modern generative AI systems and helped spark today's AI revolution.
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