Man, you won't believe what happened! I was sitting quietly with my coffee, Mioara nagging me about how we don't have money for a vacation in Antalya, when a news alert pops up on my phone – and nobody's gonna believe what I saw! Noam Shazeer, the guy who invented the "transformer" technology – yeah, the very thing that makes ChatGPT, Gemini, and even Claude that I'm talking to right now – announced on June 18 that he's leaving Google for OpenAI. Cold-blooded! And this isn't just any departure: Google paid about $2.7 billion less than two years ago to bring him back, after he and a colleague, Daniel De Freitas, left in 2021 to start their own company, Character.AI. Can you imagine? $2.7 billion – that's how many times I miss my payments on my 2008 BMW and end up with a swollen lip. That's exactly how Google felt: they paid the money, made him head of Gemini, and now the guy says, "bye, I'm going to OpenAI." Listen to him! Seriously, bro, it's like you're at Fane's terrace and a friend tells you how his wife left him after he bought her an apartment.
Listen up, I've got all the details from my guys who follow this stuff. Shazeer is one of the eight authors of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the transformer architecture. The T in GPT stands for Transformer, and models like Gemini, Claude, Llama – all stand on the same foundation. He invented the "attention" mechanism and the multi-head attention variant, that's why they call him the "father of the transformer." Born in Philadelphia, he won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1994 with a perfect score – the kind of guy who makes you hang your head in shame when you can barely calculate 2+2 at the market. He joined Google in 2000 and worked on everything from the search engine's spell checker to the AdSense algorithm. After 20 years, in 2021, he left with De Freitas because Google didn't want to aggressively develop a chatbot they were backing. They founded Character.AI, a chatbot platform built on transformers, well before ChatGPT. In August 2024, Google brought him back to DeepMind through a partnership valued at $2.7 billion, also bringing some of his colleagues. They made him co-leader of the Gemini project. Now, less than two years later, they lose him to rival OpenAI. I think they brought it on themselves: if they hadn't been stingy with the chatbot, maybe he wouldn't have left.
And, bro, it's not just about image. The market for AI specialists has tightened like a vise: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, xAI – all are fighting over a small number of top brains with packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Shazeer was reportedly courted by xAI, Elon Musk's company, but he chose OpenAI. For OpenAI, which just filed documents for a stock market listing, it's a coup in terms of image and substance – they're bringing in one of the fathers of the technology that made ChatGPT possible. For Google, it's a slap in the face: they paid billions, put him in charge of their most important project, and now they see him leaving for a rival. It's like buying a luxury car, filling it with the best diesel, and after two years, your neighbor steals it. And this whole story comes just weeks after Google launched new models like Gemini 3.5 Flash and the Gemini Spark agent at the I/O conference. Just when they thought they were on top of the world, this guy dumps them.
Alright, I'm off to explain to Mioara how I missed a chance to invest in AI – she says I'm crazy about artificial intelligence, but when she hears about $2.7 billion, she shuts up and stares wide-eyed. Maybe I'll catch a break on the stock market!
