OpenAI adds Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to growing talent roster

3 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Jun 18, 2026 08:13 AM IST

OpenAI’s latest move seems to be aimed at strengthening its research team as AI companies compete for leading talent and advanced models. (Express Image)

IPO-bound OpenAI seems to have secured yet another big name in its talent roster. Noam Shazeer, who was the vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of the Gemini models, will be joining the Sam Altman-led AI company. Shazeer’s recruitment by ChatGPT-maker comes at a time when big tech is competing to obtain the best talent and introduce the most advanced models.

The AI researcher announced his exit through a post on X. “I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there,” he wrote.

Shazeer is reportedly leaving in less than two years after Google paid about $2.7 billion to bring him on board. Earlier he was serving as the head of the startup – Character.AI, and had brought along a team of his researchers to Google.

Talking about his move in his post, Shazeer said that it was a difficult decision to move on adding that he is incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything they built together. “ It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you,” he wrote.

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…

— Noam Shazeer (@NoamShazeer) June 18, 2026

https://platform.x.com/widgets.js

Following his exit, in a statement to Reuters, the Search giant expressed that the company was grateful for Noam’s meaningful contributions to Google over the years.

OpenAI has steadily recruited some of Google DeepMind’s most respected researchers. In late 2024, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai left Google DeepMind to join OpenAI, bringing expertise in computer vision, multimodal AI and large-scale foundation models.

These Google Deepmind alumni played important roles in advancing Vision Transformers (ViT) and other cutting-edge AI systems that power the modern image and multimodal models. In December 2025, OpenAI also hired Albert Lee, a veteran Google executive who steered corporate development efforts across Google Cloud and DeepMind.

Story continues below this ad

In recent times, perhaps OpenAI’s biggest talent acquisition is likely Shazeer. He is one of the original authors of the 2017 Transformer paper (“Attention Is All You Need”), helped lead Gemini at Google, founded Character.AI, and was re-hired by Google for roughly $2.7 billion before now moving to OpenAI.

OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Meta are increasingly competing on talent rather than just models or compute prowess. Reuters reported that top AI researchers are now commanding compensation packages worth millions of dollars annually, with Google and OpenAI aggressively trying to recruit and retain these elite researchers.