In the ever-spiraling AI talent circus where engineers are bought back for billions, returned like luxury rental cars, and then re-hired by rivals who clearly were not finished admiring them, Noam Shazeer’s latest move from Google to OpenAI lands like another perfectly timed plot twist in a Silicon Valley soap opera, just under two years after Google paid $2.7 billion to retrieve him via the Character.AI detour, he is once again walking out the door as if the world’s most expensive revolving door has finally learned to spin both ways, leaving behind stunned boardrooms, déjà vu hiring committees, and the uneasy sense that in AI today nobody is really being hired, just temporarily hosted between exits.
Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini AI models, has left the company to join OpenAI, according to posts and statements from the parties.
“I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there,” Shazeer said 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.”
His departure comes less than two years after Google brought him back into its DeepMind unit following a $2.7 billion arrangement tied to chatbot startup Character.AI, which Shazeer co-founded after leaving Google in 2021. The deal gave Google non-exclusive rights to Character.AI’s technology and required his return to the company, according to previous reporting.
Shazeer first joined Google in 2000 and later co-authored a 2017 research paper widely credited with influencing the development of modern large language models. After Google initially declined to pursue an internal chatbot project he had advocated, Shazeer and colleague Daniel De Freitas left to launch Character.AI.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman welcomed the move on X, writing that Shazeer “is one of the people I have most wanted to work with since the very beginning of openai,” adding “only took 10 years.”
“We are grateful for Noam’s meaningful contributions to Google over the years,” Google said.
The move underscores intensifying competition for senior artificial intelligence talent among leading labs, which have increasingly relied on large compensation packages and complex deal structures to attract researchers, according to industry reporting.
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