Breaking: Google Gemini Co-Head Poached by OpenAI
In a significant industry move, Noam Shazeer, a former DeepMind researcher and co-lead of Google's Gemini project, has officially joined OpenAI as the Lead for Architecture Research. Shazeer is a legendary figure in AI, best known as a core author of the seminal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture foundational to modern models like GPT and Gemini.
Shazeer announced his move on social media, expressing excitement to join OpenAI's team while also thanking his former colleagues at Google. His career spans over 18 years at Google, where he contributed to key technologies including the Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, Mesh TensorFlow, and the LaMDA model. He left Google in 2021 to co-found the conversational AI company Character.AI, which achieved a multi-billion dollar valuation. In 2024, he returned to Google's DeepMind via a major technology licensing deal to help lead the Gemini project.
His departure is viewed as a substantial loss for Google and a major talent acquisition for OpenAI, which is intensifying its competition with rivals like Anthropic. At OpenAI, Shazeer will focus on exploring next-generation AI model architectures and the evolution beyond the current Transformer paradigm. The move underscores the fierce competition for top AI research talent as companies race to develop advanced AI systems.
marsbit06/18 04:19
