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"

Noam Shazeer, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher recruited by Google for 2.7 billion dollars (about 4 trillion won), has moved to competitor OpenAI. This transition comes less than two years after he joined Google. Concerns have been raised that Google's leadership in the generative AI field may be faltering.

According to reports from foreign media outlets such as Bloomberg, Shazeer recently left Google to join OpenAI. Previously, on June 17 (local time), Shazeer announced on his social networking service (SNS) that he had "joined OpenAI." Mark Chen, Chief Research Officer (CRO) at OpenAI, explained on the same day that "Shazeer will research methods for developing next-generation AI models." Sam Altman, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of OpenAI, welcomed the move, stating, "Shazeer is someone I've wanted to work with since the early days."

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

Shazeer is regarded as one of the fathers of generative AI. In 2017, he co-authored the influential paper "Attention Is All You Need" with Google, which introduced the core technology of large language models (LLM). This paper was the first to present the attention mechanism, which is central to LLMs, and led to the advancement of the transformer architecture that forms the backbone of most LLMs today.

Afterward, Shazeer left Google and cofounded the character chatbot startup CharacterAI, before returning to Google in 2024. At that time, Google offered up to 2.7 billion dollars to secure the technology license for CharacterAI and to recruit Shazeer. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a financial media outlet, analyzed this large-scale transaction between Google and CharacterAI, stating that "although it was nominally a license agreement, in reality, it was about securing Shazeer."

However, as Shazeer departed for a competitor less than two years after rejoining Google, there is growing speculation that Google's leadership in the AI sector is once again being challenged. Previously, Google's cutting-edge AI research lab DeepMind also experienced a talent exodus. On June 19, John Jumper, Vice President of DeepMind, stated on X (formerly Twitter) that "after nine years, I am leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic." Jumper was a key developer of AlphaFold, the AI that predicts protein folding structures, and is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind.

An official from an OpenAI investor told MarketWatch, a leading U.S. capital markets outlet, "Only a handful of researchers have delivered tangible results in the development of AI models," adding, "Competition among companies to secure such talent will intensify going forward."

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