Google lost Noam Shazeer to OpenAI — can its reasoning models survive without him?
noam shazeer, co-lead of google gemini and 'attention is all you need' co-author, joined openai. his departure threatens google's ability to compete in reasoning ai against openai and anthropic.
noam shazeer, the former google vice president of engineering and co-lead of the gemini project, announced his departure for openai. shazeer co-authored 'attention is all you need' in 2017 and recently rejoined google in a $2.7 billion deal specifically to boost the company's reasoning capabilities. his exit suggests openai is consolidating top transformer talent, potentially widening the gap in model performance. for google, losing a key architect of its ai strategy so soon after re-hiring him signals deep internal instability.