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Noam Shazeer, Google’s vice president of engineering and co-leader of the Gemini AI model, announced Wednesday that he is leaving the company to join OpenAI.
“I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the talented team there,” Shazeer said in a post on X.
“It was a difficult decision to move forward. I’m extremely proud of our amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together. It’s an honor and a pleasure to work with you all,” he added.
Shazeer’s departure comes less than two years after he returned to Google. In August 2024, Google brought Shazeer and fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas back to its DeepMind AI division as part of a partnership with Character.AI, the startup the two founded after leaving Google in 2021.
The two left Google after the company refused to actively pursue a chatbot project they had championed. They then founded Character.AI, one of the most famous AI startups.
The move highlights the fierce battle for AI talent that has become a key front in competition among technology companies.
The departure also comes weeks after Google announced new AI products at its annual I/O developer conference, including the Gemini 3.5 Flash model and the Gemini Spark AI agent.
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, secretly filed for an initial public offering earlier this month, setting the stage for one of the most high-profile technology listings in recent years.
—CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
