OpenAI is bringing on some big guns in the lead-up to its IPO
Key takeaways
- Open AI is bringing on some big names to the team in the lead-up to its public debut: Google Deep Mind AI legend Noam Shazeer and former Trump White House AI policy official Dean Ball.
- Shazeer, a co-lead at Gemini and the founder of AI role-playing startup Character AI, announced his departure on Wednesday.
- The move is the latest in a series of shufflings between the top AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Open AI is bringing on some big names to the team in the lead-up to its public debut: Google Deep Mind AI legend Noam Shazeer and former Trump White House AI policy official Dean Ball.
Shazeer, a co-lead at Gemini and the founder of AI role-playing startup Character AI, announced his departure on Wednesday. He had been at Google since 2000, leaving only for a three-year period when he left to co-found Character AI. Two years ago, Google re-hired Shazeer in a $2.7 billion deal that gave the tech giant access to the startup’s technology.
The move is the latest in a series of shufflings between the top AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Shazeer is credited for being one of the foundational minds behind modern generative AI. He co-authored the seminal 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture.