Noam Shazeer is an American AI researcher known for foundational contributions to the neural-network architectures underlying large language models. He is a co-author of "Attention Is All You Need" (Vaswani et al., 2017), the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture (Source: arxiv.org; Attention Is All You Need). Over a long tenure at Google and Google Brain he also worked on the mixture-of-experts approach to scaling models, among other architectural techniques.
Career
Shazeer spent much of his career at Google before leaving in 2021 to co-found Character.AI with Daniel De Freitas, building consumer-facing conversational agents. In 2024 Google brought both founders back through an arrangement reported at roughly $2.7 billion that licensed Character.AI's technology and returned its leadership to Google DeepMind; Shazeer became a vice president of engineering and a co-lead of the Gemini models (Source: eciks.org; theinformation.com). The deal is treated as a prominent example of the talent-acquisition structure analyzed in The AI Acquihire Pattern, in which large labs absorb a startup's founders and technology without a conventional acquisition.
On June 17, 2026, Shazeer announced he would leave Google to join OpenAI, less than two years after his return and as OpenAI — which had confidentially filed for an initial public offering earlier in the month — intensified competition for senior AI researchers (Source: cnbc.com; theinformation.com). The move is part of a broader contest among frontier labs for a small pool of senior researchers, a pattern also reflected in Meta's 2025 hiring efforts.
Litigation
Shazeer is named alongside Character.AI and Google in Garcia v. Character.AI, a wrongful-death suit brought after the death of a teenage user, which raises questions about liability for harms attributed to companion chatbots (Source: courtlistener.com).
Relationships
- related: Attention Is All You Need — co-author of the paper introducing the Transformer.
- related: Mixture of Experts (MoE) — contributor to MoE scaling techniques.
- related: Character.AI — co-founder.
- related: OpenAI — joined June 2026.
- related: Google DeepMind — former VP of engineering and Gemini co-lead.
- instance-of: The AI Acquihire Pattern — 2024 Character.AI return.
- related: Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc. — named defendant.