Google Paid $2.7B to Keep Its Best AI Researcher. He Left Anyway.

In 2024, Google paid $2.7 billion to bring Noam Shazeer back. Shazeer invented the transformer architecture, the foundation behind GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Google said: "We can't lose this person." June 2026. Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI. This isn't one person's story. It's a pattern. Google DeepMind's best researchers are walking out the door to AI startups, one by one. Who Left? Noam Shazeer — The man who invented the transformer. Co-lead of Google's Gemini model. Goog...