Woofun AI reports that Noam Shazeer, a founding figure in modern generative AI, has officially left Google to join competitor OpenAI. As the new hire, Shazeer will concentrate on exploring novel large-scale model architectures and advancing the evolution of the Transformer framework, which underpins industry-leading systems like ChatGPT and Gemini.

Shazeer’s departure marks a significant shift in the talent landscape following his brief return to Google in August 2024. After co-founding Character.AI and cashing out an estimated $750 million to $1 billion from Google’s $2.7 billion acquisition, he served as Vice President and Co-Technical Lead for Gemini. His exit leaves Google without its core technical lead while empowering OpenAI to address the compute limitations of current architectures, aiming to secure a competitive edge against rivals such as Anthropic and Google in the next generation of AI development.