Alphabet slid more than 4% in early Monday trading. Noam Shazeer, Google Vice President of Engineering and co-head of its Gemini AI model, has recently announced his resignation, confirming he will join rival firm OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
Google expressed sincere gratitude to Noam Shazeer for his remarkable contributions to the company over the years and wished him all the best in his future endeavors.
In his fifties, Noam Shazeer is a towering pioneer in the artificial intelligence industry. He first joined Google back in 2000. His most landmark achievement was co-authoring the groundbreaking paper Attention Is All You Need with his colleagues in 2017, which proposed the Transformer architecture.
This technology revolutionized the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP), serving as the core underlying technology for modern large language models (LLMs) including ChatGPT and Gemini, and is widely regarded as the starting point of the generative AI boom.
After leaving Google in 2021, he co-founded Character.AI, an AI chatbot startup. In August 2024, Google struck a technology licensing deal with Character.AI, investing as much as 2.7 billion US dollars to bring Noam Shazeer and his research team back into its AI division DeepMind.
