Noam Shazeer

Noam Shazeer studied mathematics and computer science at Duke and joined Google in 2000 as one of its early engineers, where his first work improved the search engine's spelling correction. At Google Brain he worked on making neural networks larger and cheaper to run. In January 2017 he was lead author of the paper on sparsely gated mixture-of-experts layers, which routed each input through a few of thousands of sub-networks, and that June he was one of the eight equal contributors to "Attention Is All You Need," the transformer paper. In November 2019 he wrote, as sole author, the paper introducing multi-query attention, which made transformer text generation faster.

With Daniel De Freitas he built Meena, a conversational chatbot. The Wall Street Journal reported that Google declined to release it publicly over safety and fairness concerns, and that Shazeer had predicted it could one day replace search. The pair left in 2021 and founded Character.AI, where users chat with AI personas; it reached a valuation of one billion dollars by 2023.

In August 2024 Google signed a non-exclusive license to Character.AI's models and hired Shazeer, De Freitas and part of the research team into Google DeepMind. Google described it as welcoming back "a preeminent researcher"; the Journal reported that Google paid about 2.7 billion dollars, in large part to bring him back. In May 2025 Bloomberg reported that the Justice Department was examining whether the arrangement was structured to avoid merger review; Google said Character.AI remained "a separate company." Shazeer became a Gemini co-lead. Families who sued Character.AI over harms to teenagers named him, De Freitas and Google as defendants; the parties agreed to settle in January 2026, on undisclosed terms.

On 18 June 2026 he announced he was leaving Google for OpenAI, calling it "a difficult decision to move on." OpenAI had not disclosed his title by September 2026.