Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images<\/p>\n
Google’s vice president of engineering and a co-lead of its Gemini AI models Noam Shazeer announced Wednesday that he was leaving the company to join OpenAI.<\/p>\n
“I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there,” Shazeer said in a post on X<\/a>.<\/p>\n “It was a difficult decision to move on. I’m incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you,” he added.<\/p>\n Shazeer’s departure comes less than two years<\/a> after he returned to Google. In August 2024, Google brought back Shazeer and fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas to its DeepMind AI unit as part of a partnership with startup Character.AI, which the pair founded after leaving Google in 2021.\u00a0<\/p>\n The two had left Google after it declined to aggressively pursue a chatbot project they had championed. They subsequently founded Character.AI, one of the most prominent AI startups.<\/p>\n The latest move underscores the intense battle for top AI talent, which has become a key front in competition among technology companies.<\/p>\n The departure also comes weeks after Google unveiled new AI products<\/a>, including its Gemini 3.5 Flash model and Gemini Spark AI agent, at its annual I\/O developer conference.<\/p>\n OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, confidentially filed for an initial public offering earlier this month<\/a>, setting the stage for one of the most closely watched technology listings in recent years.<\/p>\n \u2014 CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.<\/p>\n