谷歌 Gemini 聯合負責人 Noam Shazeer 離職投奔 OpenAI

Google Engineering Vice President and Gemini Model Co-Head Noam Shazeer announced his resignation to join OpenAI. This year alone, OpenAI has recruited more than 85 people from Salesforce, and the talent acquisition battle among AI industry leaders is growing more intense by the day.
(Background: ChatGPT’s market share first drops below 50%! Gemini is closing in, and Claude’s paid conversion rate remains the highest)
(Additional context: AI giants such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind will attend the G7 summit)

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• Noam Shazeer: Father of the AI Attention Mechanism
• OpenAI’s Talent Acquisition War
• The Significance of the AI Talent Battle

Google Engineering Vice President and Gemini artificial intelligence model co-leader Noam Shazeer announced on June 18 that he would be leaving and joining OpenAI. Shazeer posted on X, saying: “I’m pleased to announce that I will be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the excellent team there. Leaving Google was a difficult decision. I’m incredibly proud of everything we built together at Google.”

Noam Shazeer: Father of the AI Attention Mechanism

Noam Shazeer is a key figure in the AI field, best known for proposing the multi-head attention mechanism (Multi-Head Attention) in 2014. This technology later became the cornerstone of the Transformer architecture, and the foundation for today’s mainstream large language models such as GPT, Gemini, and Claude.

Shazeer joined Google Brain in 2015, and later contributed to building Google’s first-generation Transformer model, the PaLI multimodal model, and the Gemini series. He is regarded as one of the core figures helping Google maintain competitiveness in the AI arena.

OpenAI’s Talent Acquisition War

Shazeer’s switch isn’t the only recruitment move by OpenAI this year. According to The Information, disclosed on June 17, this year OpenAI and Anthropic have already poached more than 85 employees from Salesforce, including about 40 joining OpenAI and nearly 45 joining Anthropic.

Audited financial data from last year shows that the company’s total annual spending reached $34 billion, of which R&D investment is about $19 billion. Currently, OpenAI is moving forward with its IPO plan, and its overall valuation is expected to exceed $1 trillion.

The Significance of the AI Talent Battle

Shazeer’s departure highlights the competitive landscape of the AI industry—leading companies are no longer only competing on compute power and funding; talent mobility is reshaping each company’s technical roadmap. As Gemini is Google’s flagship AI model, the departure of its co-leader may mean Google needs to reallocate resources for the next phase of model development.

It’s also worth noting that Shazeer is simultaneously a key driving force behind Google’s internal “multimodal priors” strategy. From the very beginning of its development, the Gemini model was positioned as a native multimodal model rather than a patchwork made by stitching together single-stream models—this methodological continuity will be taken over by a new team after Shazeer’s departure.