Google’s Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer is leaving for OpenAI

Noam Shazeer, co-lead of Google's Gemini models and co-author of the landmark 2017 'Attention Is All You Need' transformer paper, is leaving Google to join OpenAI. The move comes less than two years after Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to bring him back from Character.AI. His departure raises questions about whether massive retention packages can hold top AI researchers, and signals OpenAI's continued aggressive recruitment from rivals ahead of a reported IPO.