Widely recognized for his contribution in transformer models and natural language processing, pioneering AI engineer and scientist and co-founder of Character.AI, Noam Shazeer announced his new role at OpenAI, after quitting Google Gemini as co-head.

In an x post on Thursday, Shazeer announced that he is joining OpenAI, and was welcomed by CEO Sam Altman.

“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 work with all of you (sic),” wrote Shazeer.

noam is one of the people I have most wanted to work with since the very beginning of openai.

only took 10 years.

i think it will be worth the wait! https://t.co/Hj2fjCywjv

— Sam Altman (@sama) June 18, 2026

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., Shazeer joined Google during its early growth phase, where he worked on foundational systems and was a major contributor to Google’s LaMDA dialog system. According to his personal website, he also wrote the PHIL algorithm, which became the core of the Google AdSense system.

He shot into limelight in 2017 when he co-authored a seminal paper “Attention is All You Need” which introduced the transformer model. He is recognized for his invention of the Transformer model where he designed the multi-head attention, residual architecture, and coded up the first ‘better-than-SOTA-working implementation.

He also invented sparsely-gated mixture of experts in 2016 and Mesh-Tensorflow in 2018 which was the first practical system for training giant Transformers on supercomputers.

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