Key facts
- Noam Shazeer, Gemini co-lead at Google, joins OpenAI
- Shazeer co-authored 'Attention Is All You Need', the 2017 transformer paper
- His move is a direct talent blow to Google's flagship AI model effort
- Shazeer previously co-founded Character.AI before returning to Google
NDTV reports that OpenAI has poached Noam Shazeer, the co-lead of Google's Gemini AI model, in what is being described as a major coup in the fiercely competitive global AI talent war. Shazeer is one of the most consequential researchers in the field — he was among the co-authors of the 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need', which introduced the transformer architecture that forms the backbone of virtually every powerful AI system in use today, including ChatGPT and Gemini itself.
His departure is a significant blow to Google DeepMind, which had positioned Gemini as its primary weapon against OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's AI push. Shazeer had previously left Google, co-founded the AI startup Character.AI, and returned to Google — making this latest move to a direct rival all the more striking.
For Indian users and businesses rapidly adopting AI tools — from Google's Gemini integrated into Android phones to ChatGPT powering customer service and coding assistants — this shift in talent could accelerate OpenAI's lead in developing next-generation models. It signals that the war for foundational AI expertise remains the single most important battleground in determining which platforms will shape the future of technology.