creators

Noam Shazeer: transformer co-inventor, now at OpenAI

Noam Shazeer co-wrote Attention Is All You Need, founded Character.AI, co-led Google Gemini, and since June 2026 leads architecture research at OpenAI.

Noam Shazeer, born in Philadelphia in 1975 or 1976, is an American computer scientist. He won a gold medal with a perfect score at the 1994 International Mathematical Olympiad on the United States team, then studied mathematics and computer science at Duke from 1994 to 1998. He joined Google in 2000 as one of its early employees, first improving the search engine's spelling corrector, and went on to co-author work on sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts models and, in 2017, the transformer paper "Attention Is All You Need". After contributing to Google's LaMDA dialogue system, Shazeer left in 2021 with Daniel De Freitas to found Character.AI, where he was chief executive. In August 2024 Google took a non-exclusive licence to Character.AI's technology and brought Shazeer back to co-lead Gemini alongside Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals; he became a Google vice president of engineering. In February 2026 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for the transformer and mixture-of-experts architectures. On 18 June 2026 he announced he was leaving Google for OpenAI, and OpenAI's chief research officer Mark Chen welcomed him the same day as "our new lead for architecture research". His own site now places him at OpenAI. TIME named him one of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2023.

Specialization

large language models, transformer architectures, mixture of experts

Country

United States