Noam Shazeer leaves Google to join OpenAI as AI architecture lead

Category: AI
Status: confirmed
Sources: The Decoder, Yahoo Finance, discussion
Summary: Noam Shazeer announced on 2026-06-18 that he is leaving Google to join OpenAI as Lead for AI Architecture Research. He co-led Google's Gemini models with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals and returned to Google in 2024 in a reported 2.7B USD deal that brought back him and the Character.AI team. He is a co-author of the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper.
Why it matters: A senior architecture lead moving between the two largest frontier labs during OpenAI's pre-IPO period signals continued concentration of model-design talent.
Follow-up: Watch for OpenAI confirmation of role and team, and any Gemini-team departures that follow.