Noam Shazeer

Noam Shazeer is an artificial intelligence researcher and software engineer and one of the authors of “Attention Is All You Need,” the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture. He worked at Google GoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry from 2000 to 2021, co-founded Character.AI with Daniel De Freitas in 2021 and served as its CEO, returned to Google in 2024 as a co-lead of Gemini, and announced in June 2026 that he would join OpenAI OpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry.

Contents8 sections

Key facts

2000–2021Career at Google

Shazeer joined Google in 2000 and worked there as a software engineer from 2000 to 2021.⁠[1][2]

June 2017“Attention Is All You Need”

On June 12, 2017, the paper “Attention Is All You Need” was first submitted to arXiv by Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser and Illia Polosukhin Illia PolosukhinIllia Polosukhin is an artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur, a co-founder of NEAR Protocol, the founder of NEAR AI, and a co-author of Attention Is All You Need, the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture. He previously worked in research at Google, started a company with Alexander Skidanov in 2017, and then turned to blockchain; in 2023 he was appointed chief executive officer of the NEAR Foundation. His subsequent work has involved user-owned AI, chain abstraction, and agent infrastructure.Open the full entry. The paper proposed a network architecture called the Transformer.⁠[3]

2021–2024Co-founding Character.AI

Shazeer left Google in 2021 and that year co-founded the chatbot company Character.AI with Daniel De Freitas, serving as its CEO from late 2021.⁠[4][2]

In March 2023 Character.AI raised $150 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry at a $1 billion valuation; the company said at the time that its site was nearing 100 million visits a month. The money was raised by the company, not received by Shazeer personally.⁠[4]

September 25, 2023Conversation in the a16z AI Revolution Series

On September 25, 2023, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) released the conversation “Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer,” in which Sarah Wang Sarah Wang (a16z)Sarah Wang is a venture capitalist and general partner on the growth team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). She joined a16z in 2019 and leads growth-stage investments in AI, enterprise applications and infrastructure, having invested in companies including Character.AI, Wiz, Cursor, Temporal and Exa.Open the full entry, a general partner on a16z’s Growth team, spoke on stage with Shazeer, then Character.AI’s CEO and cofounder, as part of a16z’s “AI Revolution” series.⁠[5][6]

The conversation opened with a segment in which Shazeer and an AI version of himself answered the same questions. They discussed “universally accessible intelligence,” the compute needed to power it, entertainment and AI companionship as a first use case for AGI, Character.AI’s choice of a single generalist model and a full-stack approach, and an estimate of global compute capacity.⁠[6]

On leaving Google to start a company, he said, “Let's do a startup, and let's maximally accelerate.” On the company’s goal, he said, “Our goal is to be an AGI company and a product-first company.”⁠[6]

August 2024Return to Google as Gemini Co-lead

In August 2024 Character.AI announced that it would provide Google with a non-exclusive license for its current large language model technology and that Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas and certain members of its research team would join Google; Character.AI’s general counsel, Dominic Perella, became interim CEO.⁠[7][2]

From August 2024 Shazeer was a vice president of engineering at Google and a co-lead of the development of the Gemini AI models.⁠[2][1]

June 2026Announced Move to OpenAI

On June 17, 2026, Shazeer announced on X that he was leaving Google to join OpenAI, writing, “I'm excited to share that I'll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there.” He added, “It was a difficult decision to move on.” His role at OpenAI was not disclosed.⁠[2]

Google said in a statement that it was “grateful for Noam's meaningful contributions to Google over the years.”⁠[1]

Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts

X: Public account: https://x.com/NoamShazeer (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

LinkedIn LinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noam-shazeer-3b27288/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]