Sam Altman finally got his guy. A decade after founding OpenAI, the CEO landed Noam Shazeer, the Google vice president of engineering and Gemini co-lead who co-authored the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper that made modern AI possible.
"Only took 10 years," Altman posted on X, calling Shazeer "one of the people I have most wanted to work with since the very beginning of OpenAI."
The hire is a talent heist with receipts. Less than two years ago, Google paid $2.7 billion to bring Shazeer back after he left to build Character.AI.
The deal included a license agreement that let Google use Character.AI's technology. Now the engineer Google fought to reclaim is walking out the door to its biggest rival.
Shazeer announced his departure on June 17, writing that joining OpenAI was "a difficult decision to move on" but that he was "incredibly proud" of his team at Google. He joins the ChatGPT maker as OpenAI prepares for an initial public offering in the second half of this year, with a valuation of $852 billion.
ChatGPT's share of the AI market fell below 50% for the first time as Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini gained ground. Shazeer was instrumental in closing that gap.
He co-led Gemini's development after Google brought him and a team of researchers back in 2024.
Shazeer first joined Google as a software engineer in 2000, one of the company's first few hundred employees. He rose to principal software engineer by 2012 and went on to co-author the landmark paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, the foundation beneath every major large language model today.
Altman added that he thinks Shazeer's arrival "will be worth the wait."
OpenAI, meanwhile, is moving on multiple fronts. The company unveiled its inaugural partner program this week, a three-tier system with specializations including Codex, backed by a $150 million channel investment.
It plans to train 300,000 certified OpenAI consultants by the end of 2026.
