Jun 18, 2026 - Business

Top AI researcher leaves Google for OpenAI

Dan Primack

Noam Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI, just two years after Google paid $2.7 billion to poach Shazeer and part of his team at CharacterAI.

Why it matters: This shows the limits of acqui-hires, in which the most valuable assets can walk out the door once retention periods end.

Shazeer also is viewed as one of AI's top researchers, particularly in the area of pretraining, and was co-lead of Google's Gemini.

Go deeper, via The Information: "Shazeer's hiring is a major win for OpenAI in the AI talent wars, as OpenAI competes to catch up with archrival Anthropic's most advanced models ahead of the two companies' hotly anticipated IPOs." — Erin Woo & Amir Efrati, The Information

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Top AI researcher leaves Google for OpenAI

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