Some context for people who haven’t followed the full loop: Shazeer was a long-time Google researcher, joined Google in 2000, and was one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need.”
He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead.
Well in terms of employers loyalty, they were hired to solve AI problems, and in this case they siphoned all the resources at Google, built all their tests on Google's money, time, resources, brains, crawled content, and then once it started to work left Google, leaving Google empty-handed.
Nice guys.
If you got your girlfriend/boyfriend by sneakily convincing them to cheat on their partner, don't be surprised if you are the next one to be cheated on.
Noam Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture. (From Wikipedia)
signull is more of an anonymous sh*tposter than a known industry insider, but I think this does capture the sama contribution to OpenAI very well. At least from an outsider who follows this stuff based on vibes.
That twitter story isn't anything unique to OpenAI or Google, it's just classic "big public corp vs private startup" culture. Once you have to worry about the SEC, shareholders, antitrust, regulations, lawsuits, etc. it's very, very difficult to avoid turning into "big corp" culture.
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
I disagree. It's not about the culling, it has never been, and actually, it makes things worse. You spend countless hours and tons of money recruiting talented people not to lay them off because you don't want a bureaucratic org.
If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.
Google is facing a legitimate innovators dilemma here. It makes sense to have all this process when youre protecting a $4.5 trillion golden goose. The tragedy here is that one predictable outcome of this situation is google deciding to considerably cut research funding when they figure out it just serves to bootstrap future competitors.
This is when it makes sense to split your business up into multiple smaller businesses. The government should be doing this via anti-trust but they have dropped the ball there so, at this point, the corps really need to just do it to themselves to better compete.
Don't think it matters in the long run to be honest. The models have no moat, they are becoming a commodity.
Besides that, Google is in a pretty good position, they're not bleeding money on AI like Anthropic/OpenAI, and they own product verticals where they can integrate it. Plus they have a mature ads-model which is what might actually drive a bit of revenue for LLMs.
I think the 'models have no moat' thing is overblown. Only like 3-4 companies in the entire world have cutting edge models, that means there is some kind of moat...
And Google has all of those. Custom silicon, more data than anyone else and probably the most comprehensive data collection system, and phones in the hands of 73% of the global smartphone using population to push gemini into to get high volume usage feedback and even more telemetry and data.
I don't think you're honestly accounting for the engineering behind the progress models are making. If it was just a matter of compute on hand and iterating, Meta would be neck and neck with Ant, OAI, and Google, but clearly you've gotta have more.
Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level, both algorithmically and at production scale, and knows how to leverage things at different levels.
It's not like Google won't have anyone else that can do what he does, but at the same time, it's an implicit criticism of Google's culture, operations, development, and overall AI program. Shazeer is well past the point where the paycheck is the deciding factor, although I'm certain he is very well paid. Having the freedom to innovate and build free from the corporate fuckery of Google and Facebook is probably more valuable than the pay raise he got with the move, and OAI has the advantage of not having to cope with decades of corporate cruft and inertia. They'll get there - all corporations do - but they're relatively young enough to still be nimble.
I honestly don't think that matters for multiple reasons:
1. There are already multiple "sota" models on the market that compete with only marginal gains between them (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/Gemini) and some that are catching up (DeepSeek, Qwen,..).
2. The fact that something is a hard engineering problem does not mean it's generating revenue. So while what you said is true, deep expertise is required to push the industry forward, I don't think that is going to matter for the bottom line of these companies. Hence why I think the models don't give a company any 'moat' in a capitalist economy.
yeah, sure, look at anthropic revenue, what is it if not the moat? you can argue for how long but for them good model = the fastest growing company ever.
Grabbing market-share if you have investors that are ready to burn cash infinetely. Find a hot niche, buy a banana 1 USD, sell it for 0.10 USD.
Example: Cursor, they became popular because they were selling ChatGPT unlimited for 20 USD / month.
When they launched, just a reskinned VS Code, "fastest growing AI company"
No coincidence they were bought by SpaceX, who wants to consolidate revenue even if non-sense as long it helps other investors to exit. It shows rapid growth.
Profit is the real moat.
One example: Nvidia. Proprietary tooling, proprietary IP, proprietary hardware, no alternative, expensive.
Surprised to not see more comments on this, especially given the popularity of the Anthropic/Karpathy article. What a win for OpenAI - and what a loss for Google, just 2 years after paying $2.7bn to bring Noam back into the fold. Does not bode well for Gemini long-term... Or could be a signal for how deeply they are leaning into world models.
I guess this means Google is nowhere close, to even discern
a hint of an AGI? So when Demis Hassabis says AGI...could arrive in just 3 years he has learned the best from Larry Ellison?
In this case, it's not a new thing ... back in 2005 (yes 21 years ago), people talked about the achievements of Noam Shazeer at Google (and Jeff Dean and Sanjay, etc)
Idk, football players actually make a bunch of people happy and entertained. 80% of the United States wishes this tech never existed.
What they're working on is just making peoples jobs, skills obsolete and trying to invent machines that will concentrate the worlds wealth into the hands of the people who own those machines.
Some context for people who haven’t followed the full loop: Shazeer was a long-time Google researcher, joined Google in 2000, and was one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need.”
He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead.
Now he’s leaving Google again for OpenAI.
Exciting times!
this character.ai? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3xgwyywe4o
Sounds like yet another Scam Altman, perfect match indeed.
Well in terms of employers loyalty, they were hired to solve AI problems, and in this case they siphoned all the resources at Google, built all their tests on Google's money, time, resources, brains, crawled content, and then once it started to work left Google, leaving Google empty-handed.
Nice guys.
If you got your girlfriend/boyfriend by sneakily convincing them to cheat on their partner, don't be surprised if you are the next one to be cheated on.
What a waste of money.
> Sounds like yet another Scam Altman, perfect match indeed.
Not really.
Altman couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag.
Noam is OTHO and IIUC the real deal.
Check on Wikipedia how the OpenAI deal was signed, you'll see it never been about programming but rather, deep friendships
https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1u8xc9m/most_l...
Seems like there are some insights here!
Alright. OpenAI feels like a better fit for him after all
sigh how are so many brilliant people this stupid?
Noam Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture. (From Wikipedia)
This understates his criticality. The author list was randomized, but the critical idea was truly his. Wonder what this says about GDM …
Is this a generally well known thing?
Even more important, I wonder what it says about HBW...
Wow. What could possibly have caused him to quit so soon after coming back?
I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
https://nitter.net/signulll/status/2067446889956430273 for those who don't want to click the above
signull is more of an anonymous sh*tposter than a known industry insider, but I think this does capture the sama contribution to OpenAI very well. At least from an outsider who follows this stuff based on vibes.
That twitter story isn't anything unique to OpenAI or Google, it's just classic "big public corp vs private startup" culture. Once you have to worry about the SEC, shareholders, antitrust, regulations, lawsuits, etc. it's very, very difficult to avoid turning into "big corp" culture.
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
Google and Apple both need a culling similar to what Elon did with Twitter after taking over.
Google bloat gave us transformers. Apple bloat gave us a usable touchscreen only, pocket computer.
The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.
Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)
I disagree. It's not about the culling, it has never been, and actually, it makes things worse. You spend countless hours and tons of money recruiting talented people not to lay them off because you don't want a bureaucratic org.
If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.
(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)
Google is facing a legitimate innovators dilemma here. It makes sense to have all this process when youre protecting a $4.5 trillion golden goose. The tragedy here is that one predictable outcome of this situation is google deciding to considerably cut research funding when they figure out it just serves to bootstrap future competitors.
This is when it makes sense to split your business up into multiple smaller businesses. The government should be doing this via anti-trust but they have dropped the ball there so, at this point, the corps really need to just do it to themselves to better compete.
Wasn't that what the whole Alphabet re-org was supposed to do?
Alphabet has Google with 99% of the profit through Ads, Search, Cloud, Gmail, Youtube etc
and tens of losing companies that make balloons or whatnot
This reads like an episode of Silicon Valley. I wish that show was rebooted, they'd have so much funny material nowadays.
If I had to make a guess, money played a role lol.
going to go with "money" and a lot of BS from altman
Looks like Google is leaking both AI talent and know-how something fierce ... and since the very day the transformer paper was written.
As an outsider, I'd be really curious to understand, why given how well positioned they seem to be in the AI battle:
- huge, quasi unmatched data war chest
- huge, quasi unmatched, planet-scale infrastructure
- native AI chip design and production (TPU)
- the core ideas for what we now know as "AI" were invented there
- deepmind, enough said
- pretty much the deepest pocket of all the AI players with the possible exception of MSFT
- a massively large user base and reach to deploy AI to (Android, YT, Cloud, Search, Email, ...)
- supposedly one the best engineering culture of the valley
Why do the best people leave ?
Why do their AI product always come in 3rd place ?
Why can't they seem to take the lead, both in terms of product design or in term of raw LLM performance?
The only answer I can think of is:
- culture is completely broken
- management sucks something fierce
- company is so fat and rich no one is actually interested in winning anymore
From the excited comments and fanboyism, I have to say KRAZAM predicted the cult of personality that has infected the AI space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo&ra=m
I hope this doesn't impact Google's progress on open models.
Is Shazeer known to be opposed to open-weight releases?
OpenAI hasn't released open weights since GPT-OSS-20/120B. Google has the Gemma line.
I wouldn't expect OpenAI to start releasing open weight competitive models again, but I could be wrong.
Very bad news for Gemini - the brief comeback with 2.5 Pro last year looked to be driven by Noam
Don't think it matters in the long run to be honest. The models have no moat, they are becoming a commodity.
Besides that, Google is in a pretty good position, they're not bleeding money on AI like Anthropic/OpenAI, and they own product verticals where they can integrate it. Plus they have a mature ads-model which is what might actually drive a bit of revenue for LLMs.
I think the 'models have no moat' thing is overblown. Only like 3-4 companies in the entire world have cutting edge models, that means there is some kind of moat...
Money.
That's their moat.
Maybe also stolen copyrighted content that cannot be found anywhere else now, so they are the only ones who can train on it.
money. but it eventually runs out
A little IPO is the solution.
Don't we all want to (automatically) and passively invest in a company losing billions of dollars ?
At least we can diversify our portfolio from SpaceX.
Pre-Quote: "We are all going to lose, hundreds of billions"
Their moat is running in my basement right now, on a server plugged into a 220V 30A circuit.
> models have no moat
Possibly true. Any smart innovations developed by one organization will be smuggled into others.
Training, inferring, and data collection, infrastructures are definitely moats. High-volume usage feedback is also hard to come by for new entrants.
And Google has all of those. Custom silicon, more data than anyone else and probably the most comprehensive data collection system, and phones in the hands of 73% of the global smartphone using population to push gemini into to get high volume usage feedback and even more telemetry and data.
And they've had some initial success with TPUs which could be a major differentiator in the future.
Yup, and they have the Apple partnership for now as well. Much better position generally than OpenAI in my opinion.
I don't think you're honestly accounting for the engineering behind the progress models are making. If it was just a matter of compute on hand and iterating, Meta would be neck and neck with Ant, OAI, and Google, but clearly you've gotta have more.
Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level, both algorithmically and at production scale, and knows how to leverage things at different levels.
It's not like Google won't have anyone else that can do what he does, but at the same time, it's an implicit criticism of Google's culture, operations, development, and overall AI program. Shazeer is well past the point where the paycheck is the deciding factor, although I'm certain he is very well paid. Having the freedom to innovate and build free from the corporate fuckery of Google and Facebook is probably more valuable than the pay raise he got with the move, and OAI has the advantage of not having to cope with decades of corporate cruft and inertia. They'll get there - all corporations do - but they're relatively young enough to still be nimble.
I honestly don't think that matters for multiple reasons:
1. There are already multiple "sota" models on the market that compete with only marginal gains between them (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/Gemini) and some that are catching up (DeepSeek, Qwen,..).
2. The fact that something is a hard engineering problem does not mean it's generating revenue. So while what you said is true, deep expertise is required to push the industry forward, I don't think that is going to matter for the bottom line of these companies. Hence why I think the models don't give a company any 'moat' in a capitalist economy.
yeah, sure, look at anthropic revenue, what is it if not the moat? you can argue for how long but for them good model = the fastest growing company ever.
Revenue is not a metric of success at all.
Grabbing market-share if you have investors that are ready to burn cash infinetely. Find a hot niche, buy a banana 1 USD, sell it for 0.10 USD.
Example: Cursor, they became popular because they were selling ChatGPT unlimited for 20 USD / month.
When they launched, just a reskinned VS Code, "fastest growing AI company"
No coincidence they were bought by SpaceX, who wants to consolidate revenue even if non-sense as long it helps other investors to exit. It shows rapid growth.
Profit is the real moat.
One example: Nvidia. Proprietary tooling, proprietary IP, proprietary hardware, no alternative, expensive.
Wow - Google paid a couple billion dollars to bring Noam back. Really impressive by OAI if this reporting is accurate!
It is accurate. Confirmed by Noam himself on X https://x.com/i/status/2067400851438932297
Love the choice of words by Noam- exceptional team for OpenAI, amazing team for GDM.
Love this type of detailed textual analysis.
Surprised to not see more comments on this, especially given the popularity of the Anthropic/Karpathy article. What a win for OpenAI - and what a loss for Google, just 2 years after paying $2.7bn to bring Noam back into the fold. Does not bode well for Gemini long-term... Or could be a signal for how deeply they are leaning into world models.
I think nobody they acquired from Character.AI is at Google anymore.
is it partly due to alleged antisemitism at google?
This does suck for Google. Noam will take a lot of Google trade secrets with him to OpenAi. Google's bench is deeper than this one guy though.
I guess this means Google is nowhere close, to even discern a hint of an AGI? So when Demis Hassabis says AGI...could arrive in just 3 years he has learned the best from Larry Ellison?
I would guess it means Sam Altman gave him more money.
Its getting pretty lame that we talk about the these guys like they're football players transferring teams.
In this case, it's not a new thing ... back in 2005 (yes 21 years ago), people talked about the achievements of Noam Shazeer at Google (and Jeff Dean and Sanjay, etc)
This "guy" is worth on the order of all football players put together.
Speak for yourself, my Fantasy Developer League is crushing it this season
How do I ̷g̷a̷m̷b̷l̷e̷ sports bet on this
I feel like there was a scene in Silicon Valley about a developer fantasy league.
Krazam already has a video covering this exact idea.
What's the AI equivalent of NIL?
It could be the opposite. Those are really useful people, they deserve this more than football players
Idk, football players actually make a bunch of people happy and entertained. 80% of the United States wishes this tech never existed.
What they're working on is just making peoples jobs, skills obsolete and trying to invent machines that will concentrate the worlds wealth into the hands of the people who own those machines.
Have you seen the Krazam fantasy FAANGball sketch? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo
It's funny, but with the AI hires/moves it feels more like satire now.
wait this is kinda brilliant tho
We're a community of geeks. We admire Tesla, Feynman, Linus and such. For me they are far greater than football players
Tell me open ai are in emergency mode without telling me they are in emergency mode