“I’m incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together,” Shazeer said on X, adding that he was “excited” to join OpenAI. The timing of his departure from Google was not immediately clear.
I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there.
It was a difficult decision to move on. I’m incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to…
— Noam Shazeer (@NoamShazeer) June 18, 2026
The departure comes as OpenAI prepares for an initial public offering in the second half of this year, after rival AI companies, including Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, filed for IPOs. OpenAI is currently valued at $852 billion.
However, according to Sensor Tower’s ‘True Audience’ data, which tracks users across web and mobile apps, ChatGPT’s share of the AI market fell below 50% for the first time, down from its earlier dominance as rivals such as Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini gained traction.
Less than two years ago, Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to bring back Shazeer, the former head of startup Character.AI, along with a team of researchers. The move came after ChatGPT’s launch in 2022, which transformed the AI sector. In response to the chatbot’s rapid rise, Google launched Bard in 2023, later rebranding it as Gemini.
In 2024, Google appointed Shazeer to co-lead the development of its Gemini AI model. He has been credited as a key figure behind Gemini’s efforts to close the gap with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Shazeer was among Google’s earliest employees, joining the company in 2000, where he helped improve its search engine’s spelling correction system.
He was also part of the Google Brain team and co-authored the landmark 2017 research paper “Attention Is All You Need”, which helped spark the AI boom by introducing the Transformer architecture that underpins modern large language models (LLMs).
He later left Google after the company declined to publicly release a chatbot he had developed with colleagues.
He went on to found Character.AI, a startup that allowed users to chat with AI-generated versions of well-known real and fictional characters. The company was among the earliest to build consumer chatbot products based on Transformer technology before ChatGPT’s launch.
“We are grateful for Noam’s meaningful contributions to Google over the years,” Google said in a statement.
(With inputs from agencies)
