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The AI talent wars are raging on. <\/p>\n
Two years after Google paid $2.7 billion to poach leading AI researcher Noam Shazeer and part of his team at Character.AI, Shazeer is leaving the company to join OpenAI.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shazeer worked at Google as the vice president of engineering and co-lead of Gemini, where he was credited for helping close the gap between the capabilities of Gemini and ChatGPT.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m excited to share that I\u2019ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there,\u201d Shazeer said in an X post<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a difficult decision to move on,\u201d he added. \u201cI\u2019m incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we\u2019ve built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you.\u201d<\/p>\n Shazeer was an early employee at Google in 2000. In 2017, he co-authored the research paper, \u201cAttention Is All You Need,\u201d which laid the foundation for the transformer architecture powering today’s AI boom and almost all large language models (LLMs).<\/p>\n In 2021, Shazeer left Google and co-founded the companion chatbot startup, Character.AI<\/a>. When he departed, he critiqued Google for exercising too much caution when it came to releasing new products based on transformer-based LLMs. During its 2023 Series A funding round, Character.AI was valued at $1 billion. Shazeer\u2019s high-profile moves reflect how AI labs are in an expensive and speedy competition to attract top talent.\u00a0Last year, Meta poached<\/a> several OpenAI staffers. OpenAI has poached<\/a> enterprise sales and go-to-market talent from companies including Slack, Salesforce, and Snowflake. Last year, Microsoft hired two dozen engineers and researchers<\/a> from Google DeepMind.<\/p>\n As one could imagine, the poaching wars and aqui-hiring come at a high price. <\/p>\n Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta tried to lure OpenAI staffers with $100 million signing bonuses<\/a>. And aside from the $2.7 billion licensing deal Google struck with Shazeer, the company also struck a licensing and talent deal with the AI coding startup Windsurf. For $2.4 billion<\/a>, Google DeepMind hired CEO Varun Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen, and Google licensed certain Windsurf technology.<\/p>\n Shazeer\u2019s move to OpenAI comes ahead of the company\u2019s anticipated IPO. While the company has filed a confidential S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it stated that there is no decisive timeline for when it would go public.<\/p>\n In a statement to Reuters<\/a>, which broke the news, Google said: \u201cWe are grateful for Noam’s meaningful contributions \u200bto Google over the years.\u201d<\/p>\n
In recent years, Character.AI has been mired in litigation. This past January, nearly two years after Shazeer returned to Google in 2024, Character.AI and Google agreed to settle multiple lawsuits<\/a> over teen suicides and mental health harms.<\/p>\n