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Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
https://xcancel.com/NoamShazeer/status/2067400851438932297 https://xcancel.com/NoamShazeer/status/2067400851438932297
https://www.reuters.com/technology/googles-gemini-co-lead-noam-shazeer-join-openai-2026-06-18/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/googles-gemini-co-lead-no...
- HPMOR 4mo agoWow - Google paid a couple billion dollars to bring Noam back. Really impressive by OAI if this reporting is accurate!
- alexcos 4mo agoIt is accurate. Confirmed by Noam himself on X https://x.com/i/status/2067400851438932297 https://x.com/i/status/2067400851438932297
- tmule 4mo agoLove the choice of words by Noam- exceptional team for OpenAI, amazing team for GDM.
- david_shi 4mo agoLove this type of detailed textual analysis.
- john_strinlai 4mo agoit would sound weird to say either word twice in such a short blurb.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- biffles 4mo agoSurprised to not see more comments on this, especially given the popularity of the Anthropic/Karpathy article. What a win for OpenAI - and what a loss for Google, just 2 years after paying $2.7bn to bring Noam back into the fold. Does not bode well for Gemini long-term... Or could be a signal for how deeply they are leaning into world models.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- pixelp3 4mo agoI think nobody they acquired from Character.AI is at Google anymore.
- xnx 4mo agoThis does suck for Google. Noam will take a lot of Google trade secrets with him to OpenAi. Google's bench is deeper than this one guy though.
- dansquizsoft 4mo agoTrade secrets? Like how to invent a trillion dollar technology and then sit on it for years while others eat your lunch with it? Like how to consistenly release inferior quality models to others despite infinite compute and engineering talent and insane profitability in your legacy businesses?
- bigyabai 4mo agoNot really sure what you're talking about. Apple just licensed Gemini for Siri, Google and their TPU hardware is starting to hit primetime audiences that OpenAI can only dream of.
- dansquizsoft 4mo agoMy favourite part of their strategy here is its profitability
- frollogaston 4mo agoThe Apple deal is a good sign. Before that, it was like yeah Gemini might have the lowest cost per query but that doesn't matter when its users largely aren't paying for it and never will.
- bigyabai 4mo agoGoogle only won the deal because they have great cards in their hand. Apple's homemade PCC nodes were never going to scale, but the TPUs would. Investors expected market displacement in all the wrong places. The tea leaves were pretty easy to read, too; LLMs will eventually be commoditized. Once that happens, the only road to profitable AI will be paved with 1) branding and 2) cheap compute. Apple does not possess cheap inference hardware whatsoever. Their GPUs are raster-focused, inefficient and expensive for their dedicated compute role. Unless Apple crawls back to Nvidia with their tail between their legs, TPU inference was their only real option. The deal was even more obvious when you used Apple's local foundation models; they're downright eclipsed by the quality of Gemma. Once Apple Intelligence was announced, it became clear that Apple was the branding component in search of a strange bedfellow to thumb their nose at Nvidia.
- reasonableklout 4mo agoVery bad news for Gemini - the brief comeback with 2.5 Pro last year looked to be driven by Noam
- Insanity 4mo agoDon't think it matters in the long run to be honest. The models have no moat, they are becoming a commodity. Besides that, Google is in a pretty good position, they're not bleeding money on AI like Anthropic/OpenAI, and they own product verticals where they can integrate it. Plus they have a mature ads-model which is what might actually drive a bit of revenue for LLMs.
- root_axis 4mo agoAnd they've had some initial success with TPUs which could be a major differentiator in the future.
- Insanity 4mo agoYup, and they have the Apple partnership for now as well. Much better position generally than OpenAI in my opinion.
- observationist 4mo agoI don't think you're honestly accounting for the engineering behind the progress models are making. If it was just a matter of compute on hand and iterating, Meta would be neck and neck with Ant, OAI, and Google, but clearly you've gotta have more. Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level, both algorithmically and at production scale, and knows how to leverage things at different levels. It's not like Google won't have anyone else that can do what he does, but at the same time, it's an implicit criticism of Google's culture, operations, development, and overall AI program. Shazeer is well past the point where the paycheck is the deciding factor, although I'm certain he is very well paid. Having the freedom to innovate and build free from the corporate fuckery of Google and Facebook is probably more valuable than the pay raise he got with the move, and OAI has the advantage of not having to cope with decades of corporate cruft and inertia. They'll get there - all corporations do - but they're relatively young enough to still be nimble.
- gniv 4mo agoWow. What could possibly have caused him to quit so soon after coming back? I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273 https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
- Insanity 4mo agoIf I had to make a guess, money played a role lol.
- karmasimida 4mo agoHe is close or already a billionaire, not sure much more money will be do much heavy-lifting
- efficax 4mo agoyou'd be surprised! people seem to have a limitless appetite for that money stuff. they just can't get enough of it, i've found
- eloisant 4mo agoMost are happy and stop at multimillionaires, but of course we don't hear about them. The focus on hungry billionaires is survivor bias. We don't hear about Tom from MySpace.
- VirusNewbie 4mo agoHow much money do you have? or are you just commenting from the peanut gallery?
- efficax 4mo agoi’ve got 300k in a 401k, 50k in cash and i earn 230k pretax. i’m not sure what the point of the question is tho
- petilon 4mo agoNoam Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture. (From Wikipedia)
- tmule 4mo agoThis understates his criticality. The author list was randomized, but the critical idea was truly his. Wonder what this says about GDM …
- markdown 4mo agoEven more important, I wonder what it says about HBW...
- d4rkp4ttern 4mo agoIs this a generally well known thing?
- tmule 4mo agoNope, but it’s not particularly unknown either. It shouldn’t be a surprise; he had remarkable research contributions before and after (separately, he was also an IMO gold medalist).
- flebron 4mo agoSource for this? The notion of attention dates to a content-addressable lookup during sequence alignment (as well as, concurrently, memory lookups in neural Turing machines). Attention had been used in other models, like GRUs and LSTMs with attention. The Vaswani et. al. paper did not introduce attention, just removed everything _but_ attention (and FFW) from the network. Are you claiming the "critical idea" of removing the GRU and LSTM parts and just keeping attention was "truly" Noam's?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Catloafdev 4mo agoI hope this doesn't impact Google's progress on open models.
- CamperBob2 4mo agoIs Shazeer known to be opposed to open-weight releases?
- Catloafdev 4mo agoOpenAI hasn't released open weights since GPT-OSS-20/120B. Google has the Gemma line. I wouldn't expect OpenAI to start releasing open weight competitive models again, but I could be wrong.
- irishcoffee 4mo agoTheir models are the only moat they think they have left, which at this point is more of filled-in wet circle of dirt.
- mkw5053 4mo ago[dead]
- starchild3001 4mo ago[dead]
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo agoIts getting pretty lame that we talk about the these guys like they're football players transferring teams.
- matthew_hre 4mo agoSpeak for yourself, my Fantasy Developer League is crushing it this season
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo agoI feel like there was a scene in Silicon Valley about a developer fantasy league.
- Scene_Cast2 4mo agoKrazam already has a video covering this exact idea.
- kirubakaran 4mo agoFantasy FAANGball https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo
- glaslong 4mo agoHow do I ̷g̷a̷m̷b̷l̷e̷ sports bet on this
- ttoinou 4mo agoIt could be the opposite. Those are really useful people, they deserve this more than football players
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo agoIdk, football players actually make a bunch of people happy and entertained. 80% of the United States wishes this tech never existed. What they're working on is just making peoples jobs, skills obsolete and trying to invent machines that will concentrate the worlds wealth into the hands of the people who own those machines.
- aplthrowaway67 4mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 4mo agoWe've banned this account.
- aplthrowaway67 4mo ago[dead]
- bschmidt100 4mo ago[dead]
- kxxx 4mo agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1u8xc9m/most_likely_the_real_reason_why_noam_shazeer_left/ https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1u8xc9m/most_l... Seems like there are some insights here! edit: it seems the post has been removed but comments are viewable. 1 liner summary: To put it lightly, the dude was politically outspoken and held strong beliefs.
- bbeonx 4mo ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 4mo ago[flagged]
- Avicebron 4mo agothe g-slur? I won't say it in case it is a slur, is that the word the jews call non-jews?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- sebzim4500 4mo agoThat makes way more sense, I thought he meant gypsy. In either case he should just say the word, this site isn't for children.
- bigyabai 4mo agoAvicebron is correct. I avoided being specific because I didn't want to derail the thread with responses from people that fulminate over specific keywords.
- madspindel 4mo agoI think he ment Gypsy and not Gentile.
- tcp_handshaker 4mo agoI guess this means Google is nowhere close, to even discern a hint of an AGI? So when Demis Hassabis says AGI...could arrive in just 3 years he has learned the best from Larry Ellison?
- dboreham 4mo agoI would guess it means Sam Altman gave him more money.
- overfeed 4mo agoAnd threw in a sweetener when he seemed hesitant: he can say whatever he likes about trans people in the workplace and not worry about being PC.
- Laurel1234 4mo agoNobody in the space has seen a hint of AGI. Although I can't fathom why we'd want to? Like what is the advantage of giving tools sentience?
- gzer0 4mo agoSome context for people who haven’t followed the full loop: Shazeer was a long-time Google researcher, joined Google in 2000, and was one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need.” He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead. Now he’s leaving Google again for OpenAI. Exciting times!
- ddmma 4mo agoHopefully will get to the conclusion that "Hopfield Networks is All You Need"
- tomalbrc 4mo ago[flagged]
- rvnx 4mo ago[flagged]
- diegolas 4mo agotalent poaching is something pretty common in tech, google knows something like this can and will happen, so does openAI also "empty handed" is just unnecesarily dramatic, he left all the knwoledge base he helped build, that's google's IP and is worth m(b?)illions
- DroneBetter 4mo agoI think it becomes somewhat more defensible when considering that the alternative was operatiny Google's policy (before the advent of competition) of "these models would bring unknown dangers in the hands of the public, we shouldn't release them until we better understand the implications" (or perhaps more selfishly "these effectively nullify all our detectors of generated text, if released they would instantly lose us the war on SEO"). (recall that OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too powerful to release for approximately tantamount reasons)
- yigalirani 4mo ago[flagged]
- uejfiweun 4mo agoAny sources on this?
- mrcwinn 4mo agoI would just love to hear your definition of that word.
- hiddencost 4mo agoDefining opposition to genocide as antisemitic is a really bad idea.
- ReptileMan 4mo agoTell me open ai are in emergency mode without telling me they are in emergency mode
- sph 4mo agoFrom the excited comments and fanboyism, I have to say KRAZAM predicted the cult of personality that has infected the AI space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo&ra=m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo&ra=m
- ur-whale 4mo agoLooks like Google is leaking both AI talent and know-how something fierce ... and since the very day the transformer paper was written. As an outsider, I'd be really curious to understand why, given how well positioned they seem to be in the AI battle: - huge, quasi unmatched data war chest - huge, quasi unmatched, planet-scale infrastructure - native AI chip design and production (TPU) - the core ideas for what we now know as "AI" were invented there - deepmind, enough said - pretty much the deepest pocket of all the AI players with the possible exception of MSFT - a massively large user base and reach to deploy AI to (Android, YT, Cloud, Search, Email, ...) - supposedly one the best engineering culture of the valley Why do the best people leave ? Why do their AI product always come in 3rd place ? Why can't they seem to take the lead, both in terms of product design or in term of raw LLM performance? The only answer I can think of is: - culture is completely broken - management sucks something fierce - company is so fat and rich no one is actually interested in winning anymore
- dwrodri 4mo agoGoogle has muddied the waters on their Gemini usage statistics as it now powers a big chunk of Search. Depending on how you cut it, Gemini (and Gemini powered products) are probably producing the most output tokens seen by the most human eyeballs by a large margin. Google at its core is not a dev tools company and it has become evident that is where the money is given the verifiable nature of software. Hixie's reflections on his tenure at Google still ring in my head to this day, though I have never worked there[1]. The people at the helm of Google no longer see the company's identity as something which must be channeled through a product or an experience. Some will point to the DoubleClick acquisition, others will point to Google Reader, or Pichai's ascension. Despite his very short tenure, MBA/McKinsey-brain is a very real phenomenon and it's no mistake that it shaped the "promotion packaged as a product launch" culture that steered Google away from seriously betting on anything that wasn't ads. To quote the signull tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, you can have everything at Google, except for permission. Most importantly--I don't think there's a single tech product where I can point and say "Google wouldn't do that". You can contrast this with say, other Alphabet companies which don't suffer from this remotely as much. It is VERY clear what Waymo and YouTube are trying to accomplish, and while it frequently makes a ton sense for the companies to share infrastructure and product knowledge, YouTube does an exceptional job on the product side of making it very clear what they would and wouldn't do. They have experimented and shut down experimental features before (is their MOOC functionality still around?), but since it's fairly clear Google specifically is no longer working in service to the mission of providing the world's best digital portal for accessing information, I think it would behoove of them to figure out what their mission is. 1: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bschmidt100 4mo ago[dead]
- ur-whale 4mo agoSilver lining: given the leaked financials of OpenAI, he might very well be joining a sinking ship. Also, why didn't they nail him down contractually when they bought character.ai ... isn't that pretty standard with these type of superstar (re)hires?
- mrandish 4mo agoYou can't force someone to keep taking your money (that's indentured servitude), you can only incentivize them to stay with increasing amounts of money. Google almost certainly did do that. Probably by vesting his hiring bonus over 2-3 years. OpenAI is in a unique position right now to grant pre-IPO options (probably in the form of RSUs). And they wanted him badly enough to grant the extra options necessary to effectively 'buy out' whatever unvested Google bonus he's walking away from.
- ur-whale 4mo agoYah, I guess Cali doesn't allow non-competes or something like that. LOL.
- nostrademons 4mo ago[Edit: note that my comment was reparented, it was originally a response to someone claiming Noam was another "Scam Altman". I don't mind the reparenting or the killing of the original subthread, but I feel like this is necessary context to understand this.] Noam is the real deal, he was pretty legendary within old-time ('00s) Google engineering. Paul Buchheit had a story about interviewing him with the "how to write a spellchecker" question and then him coming up with something better than the state-of-the-art, then basically delivering Google's spell corrector in his first 2-week Noogler project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gilk-76W9rE&t=60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gilk-76W9rE&t=60
- root-parent 4mo agoIf he is supposedly extremely smart, then surely he would have known what he was doing. So how can anyone claim all this was just an accident? "Google and Character.AI agree to settle lawsuits over teen suicides" - https://www.axios.com/2026/01/07/google-character-ai-lawsuits-teen-suicides https://www.axios.com/2026/01/07/google-character-ai-lawsuit... Be aware...very disturbing: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/e2e8fc50-a9ac-05ec-edd7-277cb0afcdf2/2025-09-16%20PM%20-%20Testimony%20-%20Garcia.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/e2e8fc50-a9ac...
- janalsncm 4mo agoIs this genuinely confusing for people? He helped invent the transformer, he didn’t solve content moderation.
- mikeryan 4mo agohe didn’t solve content moderation. Considering what character.ai is, maybe he should have at least taken a shot at it.
- freejazz 4mo agoJust from reading the threads here it seems readily apparent that he then went to start this company that did these bad things. Does not seem confusing at all?
- fancyfredbot 4mo agoQuestion one: How much did this cost OpenAI? Question two: Why are OpenAI spending that money taking talent from Google, who can definitely outspend them for talent, and not Anthropic, who are leading the market and are at least somewhat financially constrained.
- supern0va 4mo agoReporting on this seems to indicate that people at Anthropic are significantly more loyal, and that attempts to poach by OpenAI and Meta have been largely unsuccessful.
- bootsmann 4mo agoTheir options are probably insane sunk cost, hard to steal an engineer who has Xm in potential gains if they choose to stay.
- supern0va 4mo agoPeople seem to have turned down offers that would have netted out more upside for them, so it doesn't seem to just be that. Anthropic seems to lure in the true believers, whereas people are highly skeptical of Sam's motivations these days (particularly after how much safety/alignment has been reportedly cut). But I'm sure for at least some folks, this is true, given recent valuations.
- TiredOfLife 4mo agoAnthropic is a cult making a god.
- alecco 4mo agoAllegedly OpenAI is struggling to jump to bigger models and had serious issues in the past (4.5) and also allegedly Shazeer is just the right guy for that. OpenAI is having issues hiring talent as most SF-style people want to go to Anthropic. Shazeer seems more politically aligned with OpenAI. But it's all speculation.
- ctdinjeu7 4mo ago[flagged]
- highfrequency 4mo ago> idea thief. Takes credit for others’ work. Based on what?
- sandeepkd 4mo agoI think this is a hard question if you ask people to start providing proof for things like this. A lot of such opinions are usually baked into individuals personal experience and perception. Nevertheless one has to feel very strongly to share such a take here in this manner unless they are gaining something from it.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo agoWhat? If I call someone a thief, I should be able to point to something they stole.
- ipaddr 4mo agoIn a court of law sometimes. In the real world some facts have verifiable proof but the majority have little if anything that can be shared publicly or exists.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo agoIf someone called my friend a thief and couldn’t even point to what they stole, I’d mercilessly judge them even outside a court of law. That’s a serious accusation. Going off vibes is totally inappropriate.
- sandeepkd 4mo agoThere is a big difference how one acts in a court and in real life. The original statement could either be a slandering (hard to know what they get to gain from it) or its their bitter experience/perception that they feel strongly about, are are sharing on a platform like this.
- HardCodedBias 4mo agoHuge blow to Google. I doubt that the money had anything to do with it. I also doubt that the state of the technology at OAI vs. Google had much to do with it, Google is behind no doubt, but the gap is not as far as we know, insurmountable. I suspect that this is a leadership clash. Noam was working in GDM. GDM somehow went away from coding and RSI into "world models" and that has played out very poorly. Who made that call? Who was still playing politics? Given this is Noam the list of people that could be pissing him off is very small: Demis, Sergey (?!), a couple of VPs in GDM. What the hell happened?
- dekhn 4mo agoIt's entirely possible he got in a flame war over political issues with other Googlers and Google asked him to leave.
- mlmonkey 4mo agoFor those interested, Wired ran a backstory about the Attention is All You Need paper 2 years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-modern-ai-transformers-paper/ https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-... It gives some context on the contributions of each of the authors. About Shazeer, from the article: Shazeer’s joining the group was critical. “These theoretical or intuitive mechanisms, like self-attention, always require very careful implementation, often by a small number of experienced ‘magicians,’ to even show any signs of life,” says Uszkoreit. Shazeer began to work his sorcery right away. He decided to write his own version of the transformer team’s code. “I took the basic idea and made the thing up myself,” he says. Occasionally he asked Kaiser questions, but mostly, he says, he “just acted on it for a while and came back and said, ‘Look, it works.’” Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” he had taken the system to a new level.
- SiempreViernes 4mo ago> Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.
- dang 4mo ago"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- anon_shill 4mo agoDoes that apply to quotes from an article? They seemed to be criticizing a second or third degree source for being PR, which feels fair.
- dang 4mo ago
- xyst 4mo agoThis is what you call a PR hire.
- nothrowaways 4mo agoGood luck Noam, Gemini is a great piece of work.
- pixelneon 4mo agoNiceee
- ath3nd 4mo ago[dead]
- mosfets 4mo agoHow to be a legend like him?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- razodactyl 4mo agoOh! Big deal. Exciting.
- aykutseker 4mo agoAI hiring starting to look like sports free agency. Karpathy to Anthropic, now Noam to OpenAI.
- throwaway314155 4mo agoI thought Karpathy was going to OpenAI?
- tnorthcutt 4mo agohttps://x.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312?lang=en https://x.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312?lang=en
- ripped_britches 4mo ago[flagged]
- AiNexus 4mo ago[flagged]
- adonese 4mo agoI'm curious to know the hype behind the hiring for Karpathy and Noam. In the sense that did oai and anthropic do that for sort of long term and potential new directions (investing in them so they come up with the new transformer). Because it definitely cannot be just a regular filling vacant roles. Because I think as far as running the existing models and handling whatever nuances, it must be well understood by oai and ANT -- but you don't what you don't know.
- throwa356262 4mo agoGoogle seems to have difficulties keeping their AI talent. What is going on at Google?
- wildrhythms 4mo agoThe engineers let the know-nothing tech illiterate MBAs drive the ship
- fsuts 4mo agoHe was one of the leaders and not the leader And Deepminds Demis Hassabis was the single other? Or were there more? So didn’t they get on? The latter is in London so time difference to put up with too
- starchild3001 4mo agoFor those who missed: Gemini coding and agentic capabilities have been lagging the sota models (Opus mostly) since Dec 2026. If you're a co-lead and your model is underperforming there has to be some consequences. I don't know as a fact if this has anything to do with Noam's departure, but work performance is never about past successes.
- DrScientist 4mo agoSorry to bring up the elephant in the room - but could this decision be in part the opportunity to acquire large amounts of stock before a massively inflated IPO?
- SilverBirch 4mo agoGoogle acquired his company in 2024 for $2.7Bn with him taking about 40% of that. I'm quite sure that no matter where he went, any lab or his own start up, he would be fine financially.
- DrScientist 4mo agoI'm sure he was fine financially when he first worked at Google - without leaving to found the startup as well. But money at that level isn't about being financially secure - to have a roof over your head and food to eat - it's about power. Money at that level gives you the ability to shape the world in ways others can only dream of - whether that be starting your own company where you can set the values, funding a cure for Malaria, or political lobbying. Depends on whether the person in question has strong views and a strong belief that they are in the right. Full disclaimer - I have no insight or knowledge about this particular person - just making the rather obvious and general case that joining OpenAI now at a senior level is likely to generate a serious windfall, and such a windfall is power. As I said, no idea what motivates this particular person - don't know them at all - the money may be entirely coincidental and it's all about getting stuff done - but he did choose OpenAI rather than somebody like Anthropic....
- DrScientist 3mo agoBTW I notice John Jumper chose Anthrophic ( or vice a versa ).
- trolleski 4mo agoShouldn't ai create ai research at this point?
- ltononro 4mo agoI wonder about the motivation to switch teams. What has Google done wrong? Was he tired? He could retire, open his own lab, raise capital. So many opportunities, why go to OpenAI? Folks talking about the amount of money paid, wasnt he the guy that was acqhired for billions? would OAI pay billions (basically to google) to get him?
- whiplash451 4mo agoAt this point it might be about talent. He could raise and build his own company. But the ability to attract the level of talent that Google/Anthropic/OpenAI have is a different story.