The father of three lives in Palo Alto, California, with his wife, Yael Shaham Shazeer, who also reportedly worked at Google.
In one interview, Shazeer told how his grandparents survived the Holocaust by fleeing to the former Soviet Union before later living in Israel and emigrating to the United States.
He was born in Philadelphia in 1976 to a father who went from being a maths teacher to an engineer, and a mother who worked at home.
A maths prodigy, Shazeer won a gold medal with a perfect score at the 1994 International Mathematical Olympiad as part of the US team. His sister was later ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew College in Massachusetts.
He studied mathematics at Duke University from 1994 to 1998, before joining Google in 2000 as a software engineer.
In 2017, he was one of the co-authors of Attention Is All You Need, the landmark paper widely credited with transforming artificial intelligence research and underpinning modern AI chatbots.
At Google, Shazeer and his colleague Daniel de Freitas also developed a conversational AI system called Meena.
After Google reportedly declined to release the chatbot publicly, the pair left the company in 2021 to found Character.AI, a platform that allows users to interact with fictional or real personas for entertainment and educational purposes. The company quickly became one of the most closely watched startups in the AI sector.
[Missing Credit]Noam Shazeer (Credit: X)
In 2023, Shazeer was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence.
He served as CEO of Character.AI until August 2024, when Google acquired the company’s leadership team, including Shazeer and around 30 employees, in a deal valued at roughly $2.6 billion. The transaction was among the largest of its kind in the industry.
Shazeer reportedly earned between $750 million and $1 billion from the deal, based on his equity stake. He returned to Google as a vice-president and became technical lead on the company’s Gemini AI project.
Less than two years later, he announced he would be leaving Google to join rival OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company led by Sam Altman and valued at more than $500 billion.
Announcing the move on X, Shazeer wrote: “I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there.
“It was a difficult decision to move on. I’m incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together. It has been an honour and a pleasure to work with all of you.”
His departure coincided with a sharp sell-off in Alphabet shares as investors reacted to concerns that Google was losing key AI talent and momentum in the competitive race for artificial intelligence leadership.
