Google Hired Him for $2.7 Billion, but "How Much of a Genius Is He?" Developer Leaves for Rival Again After Just 2 Years

Google Spent $2.7 Billion to Hire Him, But He Moved to OpenAI

Core LLM Developer Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

"Fierce Competition to Secure a Handful of Genius Scientists"

Google hired artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Noam Shazeer for $2.7 billion (approximately 4 trillion won), but he has now left to join rival company OpenAI. This move comes less than two years after he joined Google. Concerns are emerging that Google's leadership in the field of generative AI is being shaken.

According to reports from Bloomberg and other foreign media outlets, Shazeer recently left Google to join OpenAI. Previously, on June 17 (local time), Shazeer announced on his social media that he had "joined OpenAI." Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer (CRO) at OpenAI, explained that Shazeer will research next-generation AI model development methods. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, welcomed him, saying, "Shazeer is someone I've wanted to work with since the very beginning."

Noam Shazeer, recognized as one of the key developers of large language models (LLM). Noam Shazeer's personal homepage

Shazeer is considered one of the fathers of generative AI. In 2017, together with Google, he co-authored the influential paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the core technology of large language models (LLMs). This paper presented the attention mechanism, a key concept in LLMs, which led to the development of the transformer architecture that now forms the backbone of most modern LLMs.

Afterwards, Shazeer left Google to co-found the character chatbot startup CharacterAI, but returned to Google in 2024. At that time, Google offered up to $2.7 billion as part of the deal, including the acquisition of CharacterAI's technology licenses and bringing Shazeer onboard. Financial media outlet The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) analyzed that the large-scale deal between Google and CharacterAI was "nominally about the license, but in reality, it was an effort to secure Shazeer."

However, with Shazeer leaving for a competitor less than two years after rejoining, there are increasing views that Google's leadership in AI is being challenged again. Previously, Google's cutting-edge AI research division DeepMind also experienced talent outflow. On June 19, DeepMind Vice President John Jumper announced via X (formerly Twitter) that he would leave DeepMind after nine years to join Anthropic. Jumper is a key developer of AlphaFold, the AI that predicts protein folding structures, and, along with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, is also a Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate.

An OpenAI investor told the U.S. capital markets media outlet MarketWatch, "There are only a handful of researchers who have produced real results in the development of AI models," adding, "Competition among companies to secure these talents will become even fiercer in the future."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.