Noam Shazeer, the vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini artificial intelligence models, announced on Wednesday that he is leaving the company to join OpenAI. Shazeer broke the news himself on X, writing that he was “excited to share” the move and calling the OpenAI team “exceptional.” The departure comes less than two years after Google paid roughly $2.7 billion to bring Shazeer back into the company, and follows several other senior researchers and executives who have moved between Google and OpenAI over the past two years.
The tracker below follows each person’s path between Google, Character.AI, and OpenAI, along with the dollar figures attached to these moves.
Inside The AI Hiring Race
Who’s Moving Where: The Google–OpenAI Researcher Shuffle
Tap a name below to trace each researcher’s actual path between labs, the dollar figures attached to their moves, and where they stand today.
Noam Shazeer
Co-author of the 2017 Transformer paper · Founder, Character.AI · VP of Engineering and Gemini co-lead at Google
Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov & Xiaohua Zhai
Computer vision researchers, formerly Google DeepMind’s Zurich team
This trio helped advance Vision Transformer (ViT) research and other foundation-model work that underpins today’s image and multimodal AI systems before leaving Google DeepMind for OpenAI in late 2024.
Albert Lee
Former corporate development executive, Google Cloud and Google DeepMind
Lee steered corporate development and acquisition strategy across Google Cloud and DeepMind before moving to OpenAI in December 2025, joining a roster of recent executive additions at the ChatGPT maker.
Why The Labs Keep Trading The Same Names
Drag the slider to see how researcher pay has been described across recent reporting on the AI hiring market. These are reported figures, not Shazeer’s personal compensation.
Figures and dates sourced from company statements, public posts, and Reuters reporting on the AI talent market.
Shazeer’s exit follows a string of similar moves. In late 2024, three of Google DeepMind’s computer-vision researchers, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, left the company’s Zurich team to join OpenAI, carrying expertise in Vision Transformer research that has shaped modern image and multimodal AI systems. Then in December 2025, OpenAI hired Albert Lee away from Google, where he had led corporate development across Google Cloud and DeepMind, to take on the same function at the ChatGPT maker.
Shazeer’s own history with Google has run on a loop of leaving and returning. He first joined the company in 2000, where one of his early projects was improving the search engine’s spelling correction tool. He left in 2021 to co-found Character.AI as its chief executive, building a conversational AI startup that grew a large user base. In 2024, Google brought him back through a roughly $2.7 billion licensing arrangement, appointing him to co-lead Gemini development alongside a VP of Engineering title. He is also one of the original authors of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” the research that introduced the transformer architecture now underpinning most large language models, including those built by competing AI labs.
Reuters has reported that top AI researchers are commanding compensation packages worth millions of dollars a year, with Google and OpenAI both recruiting and trying to retain the same pool of senior talent. Giganectar has covered related developments in AI infrastructure and hardware, including data center capacity build-outs and AI-focused laptop hardware comparisons.
OpenAI has not detailed what role Shazeer will hold once he joins, and the exact timing of his departure from Google was not confirmed in his announcement. The coverage addressed Shazeer’s exit from Google, his history with the company and with Character.AI, and the recent pattern of senior AI researchers and executives moving between Google and OpenAI.
