Why the Transformer Pioneer Left Google for OpenAI Despite a $2.7 B Offer

Early career and technical contributions

In 2000 Shazeer joined Google when the company had roughly 200 employees. He improved the search engine’s spelling‑correction system and wrote the algorithm that later became the core of Google AdSense. In 2017 he was a primary author of the paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture, and he co‑invented the Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) models that are now standard components of large language models.

Meena / LaMDA and first departure

Together with Daniel De Freitas he built an internal chatbot named Meena, which later evolved into LaMDA. After multiple internal proposals to release the model publicly were rejected, Shazeer and De Freitas left Google in 2021 and founded Character.AI.

Character.AI

The platform lets users converse with AI personas such as historical figures and fictional characters. At its peak it served more than 20 million monthly active users, with an average session length of about two hours, making it one of the most popular AI chat applications after ChatGPT.

Return to Google

In August 2024 Google signed a technology‑licensing agreement with Character.AI valued at approximately $2.7 billion. Shazeer owned roughly 30‑40 % of Character.AI, giving him an estimated personal gain of $750 million–$1 billion. After rejoining he co‑led the Gemini project with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals; under his influence Gemini 3 topped several benchmark leaderboards, prompting a “red‑alert” inside OpenAI.

Internal controversy and second departure

During his second stint Shazeer posted personal viewpoints on an internal forum, leading to his removal from the channel and public criticism by Jeff Dean. In early 2026 he announced a “difficult decision” and left Google to join OpenAI; the move was communicated internally on a Wednesday.

Impact on Transformer authorship

Shazeer’s exit marks the second wave in which all eight authors of the Transformer paper have left Google; two of them (Shazeer and Łukasz Kaiser) are now at OpenAI. The 2021 exodus was described as one of the largest talent and intellectual‑property losses in corporate history, and Shazeer is the only author Google has paid billions to re‑hire.

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