Noam Shazeer: The Transformer Architect Who Left Google, Got Bought Back, Then Joined OpenAI
bigaiguy · x · 2026-08-11
An in-depth look at the career of Noam Shazeer, one of the most consequential engineers in AI.
- Core Contributions: Co-author of Attention Is All You Need, he designed the multi-head attention mechanism. He also co-invented Mesh-TensorFlow, Sparse Mixture of Experts, Multi-Query Attention, and T5—all now standard in frontier models like GPT-4 and Gemini.
- Career Path: Joining Google in 2000, he early on fixed the spell checker and helped design AdSense. Around 2018, he co-built the chatbot Meena (LaMDA), which Google refused to release.
- Departures: Frustrated, he left Google in 2021 to found a startup. Three years later, Google paid $2.7 billion to acquire his company and bring him back to lead Gemini. Less than two years after that, he walked out again to join OpenAI.
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