Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

https://twitter.com/NoamShazeer/status/2067400851438932297

by lukasgross • 1 month ago

355 324 1 month ago

twitter.com

https://xcancel.com/NoamShazeer/status/2067400851438932297

https://www.reuters.com/technology/googles-gemini-co-lead-no...

HPMOR• 1 month ago

Wow - Google paid a couple billion dollars to bring Noam back. Really impressive by OAI if this reporting is accurate!

alexcos• 1 month ago

It is accurate. Confirmed by Noam himself on X https://x.com/i/status/2067400851438932297

tmule9• 1 month ago

Love the choice of words by Noam- exceptional team for OpenAI, amazing team for GDM.

biffles• 1 month ago

Surprised to not see more comments on this, especially given the popularity of the Anthropic/Karpathy article. What a win for OpenAI - and what a loss for Google, just 2 years after paying $2.7bn to bring Noam back into the fold. Does not bode well for Gemini long-term... Or could be a signal for how deeply they are leaning into world models.

pixelp3• 1 month ago

I think nobody they acquired from Character.AI is at Google anymore.

xnx2• 1 month ago

This does suck for Google. Noam will take a lot of Google trade secrets with him to OpenAi. Google's bench is deeper than this one guy though.

dansquizsoft2• 1 month ago

Trade secrets? Like how to invent a trillion dollar technology and then sit on it for years while others eat your lunch with it? Like how to consistenly release inferior quality models to others despite infinite compute and engineering talent and insane profitability in your legacy businesses?

bigyabai3• 1 month ago

Not really sure what you're talking about. Apple just licensed Gemini for Siri, Google and their TPU hardware is starting to hit primetime audiences that OpenAI can only dream of.

reasonableklout• 1 month ago

Very bad news for Gemini - the brief comeback with 2.5 Pro last year looked to be driven by Noam

Insanity4• 1 month ago

Don't think it matters in the long run to be honest. The models have no moat, they are becoming a commodity.

Besides that, Google is in a pretty good position, they're not bleeding money on AI like Anthropic/OpenAI, and they own product verticals where they can integrate it. Plus they have a mature ads-model which is what might actually drive a bit of revenue for LLMs.

root_axis• 1 month ago

And they've had some initial success with TPUs which could be a major differentiator in the future.

observationist• 1 month ago

I don't think you're honestly accounting for the engineering behind the progress models are making. If it was just a matter of compute on hand and iterating, Meta would be neck and neck with Ant, OAI, and Google, but clearly you've gotta have more.

Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level, both algorithmically and at production scale, and knows how to leverage things at different levels.

It's not like Google won't have anyone else that can do what he does, but at the same time, it's an implicit criticism of Google's culture, operations, development, and overall AI program. Shazeer is well past the point where the paycheck is the deciding factor, although I'm certain he is very well paid. Having the freedom to innovate and build free from the corporate fuckery of Google and Facebook is probably more valuable than the pay raise he got with the move, and OAI has the advantage of not having to cope with decades of corporate cruft and inertia. They'll get there - all corporations do - but they're relatively young enough to still be nimble.

xnx2• 1 month ago

models have no moat

Possibly true. Any smart innovations developed by one organization will be smuggled into others.

Training, inferring, and data collection, infrastructures are definitely moats. High-volume usage feedback is also hard to come by for new entrants.

maxdo• 1 month ago

yeah, sure, look at anthropic revenue, what is it if not the moat? you can argue for how long but for them good model = the fastest growing company ever.

fourseventy• 1 month ago

I think the 'models have no moat' thing is overblown. Only like 3-4 companies in the entire world have cutting edge models, that means there is some kind of moat...

dabbz2• 1 month ago

I feel like the models have no moat paradigm died when a single model expanded past the memory of single GPU slices. The moat is hosting the model. Even paying a server host to run a rack of GPUs has immense upstart cost, and then you're still struggling to compete on the add-ons of the things on top of the model (prompts, validation loops, etc). You can only throw so much money at a problem.

gniv• 1 month ago

Wow. What could possibly have caused him to quit so soon after coming back?

I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273

Insanity4• 1 month ago

If I had to make a guess, money played a role lol.

karmasimida• 1 month ago

He is close or already a billionaire, not sure much more money will be do much heavy-lifting

er4hn• 1 month ago

signull is more of an anonymous sh*tposter than a known industry insider, but I think this does capture the sama contribution to OpenAI very well. At least from an outsider who follows this stuff based on vibes.

thewebguyd2• 1 month ago

That twitter story isn't anything unique to OpenAI or Google, it's just classic "big public corp vs private startup" culture. Once you have to worry about the SEC, shareholders, antitrust, regulations, lawsuits, etc. it's very, very difficult to avoid turning into "big corp" culture.

Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.

tyre• 1 month ago

going to go with "money" and a lot of BS from altman

afavour4• 1 month ago

https://nitter.net/signulll/status/2067446889956430273 for those who don't want to click the above

throwa3562622• 1 month ago

Thank you, I quit twitter 8 years ago and generally avoid twitter links.

Someone should write a bot to do this automatically. What is the HN policy on bots?

nkg• 1 month ago

That was hilarious and sad.

busymom03• 1 month ago

This reads like an episode of Silicon Valley. I wish that show was rebooted, they'd have so much funny material nowadays.

jmaw• 1 month ago

Gilfoyle was really ahead of the times with Son of Anton.

cubano• 1 month ago

Your dream may be only a prompt away.

beng-nl• 1 month ago

I loved that show. The love that went into it really shows.

Sadly the gap between reality and satire has shrunk.

But yes. I also wish that show would come back.

Noam shazeer would be google head dreamer

swader999• 1 month ago

I think real life has far eclipsed the absurdity of the original show. They might have a hard time competing with just the news now days.

tedd4u4• 1 month ago

Three comma guy would now be four comma guy

rgreasons• 1 month ago

Thanks for this. I will be thinking about “we can create a permission working group” for a long time.

sbochins• 1 month ago

I’m convinced this is 90% of the way this actually played out.

petilon• 1 month ago

Noam Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture. (From Wikipedia)

tmule9• 1 month ago

This understates his criticality. The author list was randomized, but the critical idea was truly his. Wonder what this says about GDM …

markdown• 1 month ago

Even more important, I wonder what it says about HBW...

d4rkp4ttern• 1 month ago

Is this a generally well known thing?

flebron• 1 month ago

Source for this? The notion of attention dates to a content-addressable lookup during sequence alignment (as well as, concurrently, memory lookups in neural Turing machines). Attention had been used in other models, like GRUs and LSTMs with attention. The Vaswani et. al. paper did not introduce attention, just removed everything _but_ attention (and FFW) from the network. Are you claiming the "critical idea" of removing the GRU and LSTM parts and just keeping attention was "truly" Noam's?

mi_lk• 1 month ago

I don't know we can just say things now. Ah we're on the internet

HarHarVeryFunny4• 1 month ago

The architecture was Shazeer's, but the rough idea came from Jakob Uszkoreit who initiated the project.

Uszkoreit wanted to build a more efficient/scalable language/seq2seq model that could take advantage of GPU parallelism (replacing RNNs which were the main approach to sequence modelling at that time).

Uszkoreit's insight was that although language appears sequential, it is in fact really part parallel part hierarchical, as can be seen by linguist's sentence parse trees where at each level there is parallelism/independence between the branches of the tree, with them getting combined at the next level up. This is what gave rise to the idea of a model that consisted of a stack of of parallel processing layers (transformer layers). I believe that attention was also part of the plan from day one, as this had already been proven to be valuable (Bahdanau) with RNN seq2seq modelling.

So, this is what Uszkoreit wanted to build, but by his own account he failed to come up with an implementation that matched or outperformed the prevailing RNN approach that he wanted to replace. At this point, Uszkoreit mentioned the idea to Shazeer, who got on board and eventually arrived at a performant architecture which was then pared back by an ablation process resulting in the initial encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. Shazeer later came up with the mixture-of-experts architecture, and also other optimizations after he left to found character.ai

dyauspitr• 1 month ago

That’s not true. Jakob, Ashish and Ilia for the core idea and initial implementation and Noam for several critical details on implementation.

Catloafdev2• 1 month ago

I hope this doesn't impact Google's progress on open models.

CamperBob2• 1 month ago

Is Shazeer known to be opposed to open-weight releases?

Catloafdev2• 1 month ago

OpenAI hasn't released open weights since GPT-OSS-20/120B. Google has the Gemma line.

I wouldn't expect OpenAI to start releasing open weight competitive models again, but I could be wrong.

ai_fry_ur_brain3• 1 month ago

Its getting pretty lame that we talk about the these guys like they're football players transferring teams.

matthew_hre• 1 month ago

Speak for yourself, my Fantasy Developer League is crushing it this season

ai_fry_ur_brain3• 1 month ago

I feel like there was a scene in Silicon Valley about a developer fantasy league.

glaslong• 1 month ago

How do I ̷g̷a̷m̷b̷l̷e̷ sports bet on this

ttoinou6• 1 month ago

It could be the opposite. Those are really useful people, they deserve this more than football players

ai_fry_ur_brain3• 1 month ago

Idk, football players actually make a bunch of people happy and entertained. 80% of the United States wishes this tech never existed.

What they're working on is just making peoples jobs, skills obsolete and trying to invent machines that will concentrate the worlds wealth into the hands of the people who own those machines.

krembo• 1 month ago

We're a community of geeks. We admire Tesla, Feynman, Linus and such. For me they are far greater than football players

bbeonx• 1 month ago

wait this is kinda brilliant tho

bookofjoe• 1 month ago

What's the AI equivalent of NIL?

mrandish2• 1 month ago

This situation is kind of like backend NIL value. His value to OAI isn't just the work he'll do "on the playing field", it's the perceptual value of "OAI just hired the guy Google paid >$2B to get back" right before their IPO.

Nebasuke• 1 month ago

Have you seen the Krazam fantasy FAANGball sketch? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo

It's funny, but with the AI hires/moves it feels more like satire now.

iooi• 1 month ago

This "guy" is worth on the order of all football players put together.

chubot• 1 month ago

In this case, it's not a new thing ... back in 2005 (yes 21 years ago), people talked about the achievements of Noam Shazeer at Google (and Jeff Dean and Sanjay, etc)

I always appreciated Jeff having a level head ... which this article seems to confirm:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-cracks-down-posts...

Noumenon722• 1 month ago

I wonder if the ideological censorship described in your link is part of why Noam decided to leave.

nixon_why693• 1 month ago

Shitposting about politics on internal boards is "having a level head"?

I've seen engmisc and industryinfo, and I agree they are sometimes insufferable but having a level head would be ignoring them.

tayo42• 1 month ago

I think it's more about how the products that impact our lives might change and what might flow down to us becasue of that.

kxxx• 1 month ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1u8xc9m/most_l...

Seems like there are some insights here!

edit: it seems the post has been removed but comments are viewable.

1 liner summary:

To put it lightly, the dude was politically outspoken and held strong beliefs.

nsbk• 1 month ago

Alright. OpenAI feels like a better fit for him after all

dgellow• 1 month ago

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-cracks-down-posts... seems to have some context

statuslover9000• 1 month ago

Shazeer is an aggressive Zionist, and while Altman is better at reading the room, he has previously aligned himself with Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/openais-sam-altman-says-israel...

UltraSane32• 1 month ago

What does Zionist mean when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 78 years? I'm genuinely asking because the way the word is used doesn't make sense to me. There aren't similar terms for other countries to just stay the same, like for China to keep being run by the CCP. Every other country is assumed to have ontological inertia except for Israel.

tcp_handshaker2• 1 month ago

I guess this means Google is nowhere close, to even discern a hint of an AGI? So when Demis Hassabis says AGI...could arrive in just 3 years he has learned the best from Larry Ellison?

dboreham• 1 month ago

I would guess it means Sam Altman gave him more money.

overfeed• 1 month ago

And threw in a sweetener when he seemed hesitant: he can say whatever he likes about trans people in the workplace and not worry about being PC.

Laurel1234• 1 month ago

Nobody in the space has seen a hint of AGI.

Although I can't fathom why we'd want to? Like what is the advantage of giving tools sentience?

gzer0• 1 month ago

Some context for people who haven’t followed the full loop: Shazeer was a long-time Google researcher, joined Google in 2000, and was one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need.”

He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead.

Now he’s leaving Google again for OpenAI.

Exciting times!

Natfan• 1 month ago

this character.ai? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3xgwyywe4o

root-parent2• 1 month ago

The Netflix documentary will reveal he was secretly working for Sam Altman the whole time... (Cue diabolical VC-backed evil laugh.)

Google lost three critical years chasing AGI, and got acquired by SpaceX, now a Dyson Sphere startup whose pitch deck is just: "What if we put a paywall around the Sun?"

mlmonkey4• 1 month ago

Oui!

paulmist• 1 month ago

I first saw Noam on Dwarkesh’s podcast together with Jeff Dean. Recommend if you want a taste of what’s Google’s folks take on things.

https://youtu.be/v0gjI__RyCY?is=nz77XP4KiJy7L1AX

cubefox• 1 month ago

Exciting times!

What is exiting about this?

dude250711• 1 month ago

Maybe he figured out a good way to short AI companies?

kkotak• 1 month ago

Right?! Unless you think this move is going to generate general excitement in our lives, it's just another rich guy moving from one high paying job to another.

rhipitr• 1 month ago

At this point is it even pay that’s tempting or is it more about what they get to do? I would assume Google could easily pay them what openAI can, unless as an older company it’s harder for Google to match something really out there

p1necone• 1 month ago

Yeah my current feeling is that once I had double digit millions earning further money would be pretty meaningless to me, and the difference between 'large salary' and 'even larger salary' would be even more meaningless, but who knows maybe it really would change me. I kind of assume people like this are primarily chasing the most interesting/impactful work though.

zaat• 1 month ago

It gets to the point where what you do is the main question while payment is barely a minor concern way earlier than that point, at least in my experience. You don't need to be in the top AI research tier for that.

ddmma• 1 month ago

Hopefully will get to the conclusion that "Hopfield Networks is All You Need"

dudus• 1 month ago

How can an acquired dude leave after less than 2 years?

mikeyouse2• 1 month ago

OpenAI pays for the earn out he would’ve otherwise received at Google + a new comp package. Made up numbers, if Google still owed him $10M for lasting the full two years, OpenAI can just pay him market rate +$10M.

nl• 1 month ago

For context, the reason he left Google the first time was because Google wouldn't ship the chatbot-type products that he saw were possible.

Google bought him back (with lots of money) and made him one of the leads of Gemini.

ReptileMan• 1 month ago

Tell me open ai are in emergency mode without telling me they are in emergency mode

sph• 1 month ago

From the excited comments and fanboyism, I have to say KRAZAM predicted the cult of personality that has infected the AI space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo&ra=m

ur-whale3• 1 month ago

Looks like Google is leaking both AI talent and know-how something fierce ... and since the very day the transformer paper was written.

As an outsider, I'd be really curious to understand why, given how well positioned they seem to be in the AI battle:

- huge, quasi unmatched data war chest

- huge, quasi unmatched, planet-scale infrastructure

- native AI chip design and production (TPU)

- the core ideas for what we now know as "AI" were invented there

- deepmind, enough said

- pretty much the deepest pocket of all the AI players with the possible exception of MSFT

- a massively large user base and reach to deploy AI to (Android, YT, Cloud, Search, Email, ...)

- supposedly one the best engineering culture of the valley

Why do the best people leave ?

Why do their AI product always come in 3rd place ?

Why can't they seem to take the lead, both in terms of product design or in term of raw LLM performance?

The only answer I can think of is:

- culture is completely broken

- management sucks something fierce

- company is so fat and rich no one is actually interested in winning anymore

dwrodri• 1 month ago

Google has muddied the waters on their Gemini usage statistics as it now powers a big chunk of Search. Depending on how you cut it, Gemini (and Gemini powered products) are probably producing the most output tokens seen by the most human eyeballs by a large margin.

Google at its core is not a dev tools company and it has become evident that is where the money is given the verifiable nature of software. Hixie's reflections on his tenure at Google still ring in my head to this day, though I have never worked there[1].

The people at the helm of Google no longer see the company's identity as something which must be channeled through a product or an experience. Some will point to the DoubleClick acquisition, others will point to Google Reader, or Pichai's ascension. Despite his very short tenure, MBA/McKinsey-brain is a very real phenomenon and it's no mistake that it shaped the "promotion packaged as a product launch" culture that steered Google away from seriously betting on anything that wasn't ads. To quote the signull tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, you can have everything at Google, except for permission.

Most importantly--I don't think there's a single tech product where I can point and say "Google wouldn't do that". You can contrast this with say, other Alphabet companies which don't suffer from this remotely as much. It is VERY clear what Waymo and YouTube are trying to accomplish, and while it frequently makes a ton sense for the companies to share infrastructure and product knowledge, YouTube does an exceptional job on the product side of making it very clear what they would and wouldn't do. They have experimented and shut down experimental features before (is their MOOC functionality still around?), but since it's fairly clear Google specifically is no longer working in service to the mission of providing the world's best digital portal for accessing information, I think it would behoove of them to figure out what their mission is.

1: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

speed_spread• 1 month ago

Sounds like Noam just wanted to serve 5 terabytes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

ur-whale3• 1 month ago

Silver lining: given the leaked financials of OpenAI, he might very well be joining a sinking ship.

Also, why didn't they nail him down contractually when they bought character.ai ... isn't that pretty standard with these type of superstar (re)hires?

mrandish2• 1 month ago

You can't force someone to keep taking your money (that's indentured servitude), you can only incentivize them to stay with increasing amounts of money. Google almost certainly did do that. Probably by vesting his hiring bonus over 2-3 years.

OpenAI is in a unique position right now to grant pre-IPO options (probably in the form of RSUs). And they wanted him badly enough to grant the extra options necessary to effectively 'buy out' whatever unvested Google bonus he's walking away from.

ur-whale3• 1 month ago

Yah, I guess Cali doesn't allow non-competes or something like that.

LOL.

nostrademons• 1 month ago

[Edit: note that my comment was reparented, it was originally a response to someone claiming Noam was another "Scam Altman". I don't mind the reparenting or the killing of the original subthread, but I feel like this is necessary context to understand this.]

Noam is the real deal, he was pretty legendary within old-time ('00s) Google engineering. Paul Buchheit had a story about interviewing him with the "how to write a spellchecker" question and then him coming up with something better than the state-of-the-art, then basically delivering Google's spell corrector in his first 2-week Noogler project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gilk-76W9rE&t=60

root-parent2• 1 month ago

If he is supposedly extremely smart, then surely he would have known what he was doing. So how can anyone claim all this was just an accident?

"Google and Character.AI agree to settle lawsuits over teen suicides" - https://www.axios.com/2026/01/07/google-character-ai-lawsuit...

Be aware...very disturbing: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/e2e8fc50-a9ac...

janalsncm• 1 month ago

Is this genuinely confusing for people? He helped invent the transformer, he didn’t solve content moderation.

Noumenon722• 1 month ago

Wow, he was using AI to solve problems in 2000 already, that spell corrector being trained on the Web and becoming the first widely used AI tool. Decades ahead.

fancyfredbot• 1 month ago

Question one: How much did this cost OpenAI?

Question two: Why are OpenAI spending that money taking talent from Google, who can definitely outspend them for talent, and not Anthropic, who are leading the market and are at least somewhat financially constrained.

supern0va2• 1 month ago

Reporting on this seems to indicate that people at Anthropic are significantly more loyal, and that attempts to poach by OpenAI and Meta have been largely unsuccessful.

bootsmann• 1 month ago

Their options are probably insane sunk cost, hard to steal an engineer who has Xm in potential gains if they choose to stay.

TiredOfLife3• 1 month ago

Anthropic is a cult making a god.

alecco• 1 month ago

Allegedly OpenAI is struggling to jump to bigger models and had serious issues in the past (4.5) and also allegedly Shazeer is just the right guy for that. OpenAI is having issues hiring talent as most SF-style people want to go to Anthropic. Shazeer seems more politically aligned with OpenAI. But it's all speculation.

HardCodedBias• 1 month ago

Huge blow to Google.

I doubt that the money had anything to do with it.

I also doubt that the state of the technology at OAI vs. Google had much to do with it, Google is behind no doubt, but the gap is not as far as we know, insurmountable.

I suspect that this is a leadership clash. Noam was working in GDM. GDM somehow went away from coding and RSI into "world models" and that has played out very poorly. Who made that call? Who was still playing politics?

Given this is Noam the list of people that could be pissing him off is very small: Demis, Sergey (?!), a couple of VPs in GDM.

What the hell happened?

dekhn3• 1 month ago

It's entirely possible he got in a flame war over political issues with other Googlers and Google asked him to leave.

mlmonkey4• 1 month ago

For those interested, Wired ran a backstory about the Attention is All You Need paper 2 years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-...

It gives some context on the contributions of each of the authors. About Shazeer, from the article:

Shazeer’s joining the group was critical. “These theoretical or intuitive mechanisms, like self-attention, always require very careful implementation, often by a small number of experienced ‘magicians,’ to even show any signs of life,” says Uszkoreit. Shazeer began to work his sorcery right away. He decided to write his own version of the transformer team’s code. “I took the basic idea and made the thing up myself,” he says. Occasionally he asked Kaiser questions, but mostly, he says, he “just acted on it for a while and came back and said, ‘Look, it works.’” Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” he had taken the system to a new level.

SiempreViernes• 1 month ago

Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,”

Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.

dang2• 1 month ago

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ahmadyan• 1 month ago

As a hacker, I kinda like naom's code. I was had to implement a TC MoE kernel, and stumbled upon his code from [tensor2tensor](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensor2tensor/blob/master/tens...) and i think "alchemy" is justified. Dude writes some beautiful kernels.

He also saw LLM would replace search before anyone else, and that is something to look at the Lamda or GPT-1's output and think: yeah this will answer all of our questions one day.

epihelix• 1 month ago

The "bells and whistles" label sounds more dismissive / perjorative to me. An odd, and not a particularly nice, thing to say. Makes me wonder how the "magic" and "alchemy" terms were intended in this case, also.

chvid• 1 month ago

If I use the words alchemy and magic about a piece of code, those are not flattering words.

nothrowaways• 1 month ago

Good luck Noam, Gemini is a great piece of work.

xyst• 1 month ago

This is what you call a PR hire.

pixelneon• 1 month ago

Niceee

mosfets• 1 month ago

How to be a legend like him?

razodactyl• 1 month ago

Oh! Big deal. Exciting.

aykutseker• 1 month ago

AI hiring starting to look like sports free agency.

Karpathy to Anthropic, now Noam to OpenAI.

throwaway314155• 1 month ago

I thought Karpathy was going to OpenAI?

tnorthcutt• 1 month ago

https://x.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312?lang=en

adonese• 1 month ago

I'm curious to know the hype behind the hiring for Karpathy and Noam. In the sense that did oai and anthropic do that for sort of long term and potential new directions (investing in them so they come up with the new transformer). Because it definitely cannot be just a regular filling vacant roles.

Because I think as far as running the existing models and handling whatever nuances, it must be well understood by oai and ANT -- but you don't what you don't know.

throwa3562622• 1 month ago

Google seems to have difficulties keeping their AI talent.

What is going on at Google?

wildrhythms• 1 month ago

The engineers let the know-nothing tech illiterate MBAs drive the ship

fsuts2• 1 month ago

He was one of the leaders and not the leader

And Deepminds Demis Hassabis was the single other? Or were there more?

So didn’t they get on? The latter is in London so time difference to put up with too

starchild3001• 1 month ago

For those who missed: Gemini coding and agentic capabilities have been lagging the sota models (Opus mostly) since Dec 2026. If you're a co-lead and your model is underperforming there has to be some consequences. I don't know as a fact if this has anything to do with Noam's departure, but work performance is never about past successes.

DrScientist8• 1 month ago

Sorry to bring up the elephant in the room - but could this decision be in part the opportunity to acquire large amounts of stock before a massively inflated IPO?

SilverBirch• 1 month ago

Google acquired his company in 2024 for $2.7Bn with him taking about 40% of that. I'm quite sure that no matter where he went, any lab or his own start up, he would be fine financially.

DrScientist8• 1 month ago

I'm sure he was fine financially when he first worked at Google - without leaving to found the startup as well.

But money at that level isn't about being financially secure - to have a roof over your head and food to eat - it's about power.

Money at that level gives you the ability to shape the world in ways others can only dream of - whether that be starting your own company where you can set the values, funding a cure for Malaria, or political lobbying.

Depends on whether the person in question has strong views and a strong belief that they are in the right.

Full disclaimer - I have no insight or knowledge about this particular person - just making the rather obvious and general case that joining OpenAI now at a senior level is likely to generate a serious windfall, and such a windfall is power.

As I said, no idea what motivates this particular person - don't know them at all - the money may be entirely coincidental and it's all about getting stuff done - but he did choose OpenAI rather than somebody like Anthropic....

trolleski• 1 month ago

Shouldn't ai create ai research at this point?

ltononro• 1 month ago

I wonder about the motivation to switch teams. What has Google done wrong? Was he tired? He could retire, open his own lab, raise capital. So many opportunities, why go to OpenAI? Folks talking about the amount of money paid, wasnt he the guy that was acqhired for billions? would OAI pay billions (basically to google) to get him?

whiplash451• 1 month ago

At this point it might be about talent.

He could raise and build his own company. But the ability to attract the level of talent that Google/Anthropic/OpenAI have is a different story.

Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

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