# Noam Shazeer **Noam Shazeer** is the engineer whose name appears on the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper that introduced the Transformer — the architecture beneath every current frontier model — and whose career since has been the clearest single measure of what the labs will pay for one person. He left [[Google]] in 2021 after the company declined to ship the chatbot he had built, co-founded Character.AI, and was bought back in **August 2024** in a $2.7 billion licensing-and-hiring deal that returned him to Google as a vice president and co-lead of the Gemini models. On **June 18, 2026** he left again, for [[OpenAI]] — the same week Nobel laureate [[John Jumper]] left [[Google DeepMind]] for [[Anthropic]], two departures in forty-eight hours that sent Alphabet down and produced a run of stories about whether DeepMind could hold its people. ## Why he matters here Shazeer is the vault's data point for three things. The **acqui-hire**: $2.7 billion bought a team and a license, not loyalty, and the most valuable asset walked when the retention period ended — the limit the [[Tech Oligarchy]] pages note on the labs' ability to buy talent rather than build it. The **talent war** as strategy: OpenAI, an IPO in view and behind Anthropic on model quality by the trade press's account, hired the man who wrote the architecture. And the **compute politics** inside Google: the reported reason for both departures was allocation — who gets the chips — which is the same fight the [[AI Action Plan]] resolves at the national level in the labs' favor. See the [[AI Political Spending Ecosystem]] for where the money goes next. ## See Also - [[Google]] · [[Google DeepMind]] · [[OpenAI]] · [[Anthropic]] · [[John Jumper]] - [[AI Political Spending Ecosystem]] · [[Tech Oligarchy]] · [[AI Action Plan]] · [[Artificial Intelligence]]