Noam Shazeer leaves Gemini leadership for OpenAI

The divorce comes unexpectedly and closes a multibillion-dollar circle that began less than two years ago. Google had in fact invested 2.7 billion dollars to reacquire Shazeer and his team of researchers from the startup Character.AI, which the engineer had founded after a previous separation from Alphabet. Shazeer, who originally joined the Mountain View company in 2000, is famous in the international scientific community for being one of the co-authors of the revolutionary 2017 research paper on “Transformers”, the fundamental architecture that catalyzed the entire boom in modern artificial intelligence.

During his last tenure at Google, Shazeer was given the strategic task of leading the evolution of Gemini, a contribution that proved essential in bridging the technical gap that separated the Mountain View model from ChatGPT. Despite the sudden separation, the parties maintained institutional tones. While on the one hand Shazeer said he was enthusiastic about the new adventure and proud of the goals achieved with the outgoing team, Google publicly expressed its gratitude for the significant contribution provided by the engineer over the years.