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Noam Shazeer

Noam Shazeer's file: the Transformer, mixture-of-experts research, Character.AI, Gemini, and a 2026 jump from Google back into the OpenAI race.

Shazeer spent decades inside Google's AI machinery, helped invent mixture-of-experts systems and the Transformer, left to build Character.AI, returned to co-lead Gemini, then crossed the frontier-model war again in 2026 by joining OpenAI.

HOW THE HELL DID NOAM SHAZEER GET HERE?

  1. 2000

    HE JOINS GOOGLE BEFORE MODERN AI EXISTS

    Shazeer joined Google in 2000, working on systems including the company's spelling corrector and advertising technology before the deep-learning era.

    RECEIPTS: Noam Shazeerfirst-party

  2. 2016

    HE MAKES GIANT MODELS SPARSE

    Shazeer developed the sparsely gated mixture-of-experts approach that activated only parts of a huge neural network for each example, a design that later became central to many large models.

    RECEIPTS: Noam Shazeerfirst-party

  3. 2017

    HE CO-AUTHORS THE TRANSFORMER

    Shazeer was one of the eight authors of 'Attention Is All You Need,' contributing to the architecture that became the foundation of the modern language-model boom.

    RECEIPTS: Google Researchfirst-partyNoam Shazeerfirst-party

  4. Aug 2024

    GOOGLE BRINGS HIM BACK TO HELP RUN GEMINI

    After Character.AI struck a licensing deal with Google and Shazeer returned, Google made him a technical co-lead of its Gemini model effort.

    RECEIPTS: Reutersreported

  5. Jun 18, 2026

    THEN HE JUMPS FROM GEMINI TO OPENAI

    Shazeer left Google and its Gemini leadership team to join OpenAI, moving one of the Transformer authors directly across the frontier-model rivalry.

    RECEIPTS: Reutersreported

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