Noam Shazeer, the Google VP who co-led Gemini efforts after returning from Character.AI, announced his departure for OpenAI in what he called a difficult decision driven by excitement for the new team. Romain Huet, OpenAI's head of developer experience, publicly welcomed him on X while Sam Altman noted this was a long-desired collaboration, underscoring a high-profile AI talent shift that initially spread slowly due to venue phone restrictions.
@NoamShazeer Welcome to OpenAI, Noam!
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.
Shazeer's history co-authoring the Transformer paper and advancing sparse Mixture-of-Experts techniques positions this as one of 2026's notable researcher migrations between Google and OpenAI.
No confirmed start date, title, or project assignments have surfaced, and Google has offered no public comment on succession or internal response.
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@kyliebytes curse that venue for making us turn off our phones 🤣
my fault for being offline. What