Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer departs Google for OpenAI

Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the seminal Transformer paper, has revealed around June 18, 2026, that he is leaving his role as Google's Vice President of Engineering and co-lead of the Gemini AI models to join OpenAI. While reflecting on his time at Google as an "honor," he described the move as "a difficult decision."