The company that once laid the crucial foundation for AI development is now facing the loss of its core talent. On June 18, Noam Shazeer, a key author of the Transformer paper and co-lead of Google Gemini, announced on the social platform X that he would be leaving Google to join OpenAI, which has secretly filed an initial public offering (IPO) application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Noam Shazeer is one of the eight authors of the 2017 paper "Attention is All You Need," which laid the technical groundwork for modern large language models. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman promptly reposted and commented, stating that Noam has been one of the people he most wanted to collaborate with since the founding of OpenAI, and mused, "It only took a decade."
