The AI expertise wars are raging on.
Two years after Google paid $2.7 billion to poach main AI researcher Noam Shazeer and a part of his group at Character.AI, Shazeer is leaving the corporate to affix OpenAI.
Shazeer labored at Google because the vice chairman of engineering and co-lead of Gemini, the place he was credited for serving to shut the hole between Gemini and ChatGPT’s capabilities.
“I’m excited to share that I’ll be becoming a member of OpenAI and look ahead to working with the distinctive group there,” Shazeer stated in an X post.
“It was a tough resolution to maneuver on,” he added. “I’m extremely pleased with the wonderful group at Google and every little thing we’ve constructed collectively. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you.”
Shazeer was an early worker at Google in 2000. In 2017, he co-authored the analysis paper, “Consideration Is All You Want,” which laid the inspiration for the transformer structure powering as we speak’s AI growth and virtually all massive language fashions (LLMs).
In 2021, Shazeer left Google and co-founded the companion chatbot startup, Character.AI. When he departed, he critiqued Google for exercising an excessive amount of warning when it got here to releasing new merchandise based mostly on transformer-based LLMs. Throughout its 2023 Collection A funding spherical, Character.AI was valued at $1 billion. Lately, Character.AI has been mired in litigation: In January, practically two years after Shazeer returned to Google in 2024, Character.AI and Google agreed to settle multiple lawsuits over teen suicides and psychological well being harms.
AI labs are in an costly and speedy competitors to draw prime expertise. Final yr, Meta poached a number of OpenAI staffers. OpenAI has poached enterprise gross sales and go-to-market expertise from corporations together with Slack, Salesforce, and Snowflake. Final yr, Microsoft employed two dozen engineers and researchers from Google DeepMind.
As one may think about, the poaching wars and aqui-hiring come at a excessive value.
Final yr, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that Meta tried to lure OpenAI staffers with $100 million signing bonuses. And except for the $2.7 billion licensing deal Google struck with Shazeer, the corporate additionally struck a licensing and expertise take care of the AI coding startup Windsurf. For $2.4 billion, Google DeepMind employed CEO Varun Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen, and Google licensed sure Windsurf expertise.
Shazeer’s transfer to OpenAI comes forward of the corporate’s anticipated IPO. Whereas the corporate filed a confidential S-1 type with the Securities and Trade Fee (SEC), it said that there isn’t any decisive timeline for when it could go public.
In an announcement to Reuters, which first broke the information, Google stated: “We’re grateful for Noam’s significant contributions to Google over time.”
