Noam Shazeer (born 1975 or 1976) is an American software engineer and entrepreneur recognized for his contributions to artificial intelligence and deep learning, particularly in the development of transformer models and natural language processing. He is a co-author of the seminal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the transformer architecture, and he founded the AI company Character.AI. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
Shazeer's early life included a strong academic background. His grandparents emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel and later to the United States. His father, Dov Shazeer, was a math teacher who became an engineer, and his mother was a homemaker. Born in Philadelphia, Shazeer attended Cohen Hillel Academy in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and Swampscott High School in Swampscott, Massachusetts. He won a gold medal with a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad 1994 as a member of the US team. He studied mathematics and computer science at Duke University from 1994 to 1998, where he received the Angier B. Duke Memorial Scholarship and won prizes in the Putnam Competition as part of the Duke math team. He began graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, but left to become one of Google's first employees.
Career at Google and the Transformer
Shazeer joined Google in 2000, where one of his first major achievements was improving the spelling corrector for Google's search engine. In 2017, he was one of the authors of the paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer (architecture) architecture. This work became foundational for subsequent developments in Large language models and Generative AI. At Google, Shazeer and his colleague Daniel de Freitas built a chatbot named Meena. After Google declined to release the chatbot to the public, Shazeer and Freitas left the company in 2021 to found Character.AI.
Character.AI and Return to Google
Character.AI focused on creating customizable AI characters for conversation, leveraging the transformer architecture. In September 2023, Time Magazine named Shazeer one of the 100 most influential people in the AI world. In August 2024, it was reported that Shazeer would return to Google to co-lead the Gemini AI project, serving as technical lead alongside Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals. This was part of a $2.7 billion deal for Google to license Character.AI's technology. Since Shazeer owned 30-40% of the company, it was estimated he netted $750 million to $1 billion from the deal. In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Move to OpenAI
In June 2026, Shazeer announced he would leave Google to join OpenAI. At the time, he was a vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini artificial intelligence models. His move to OpenAI marked a significant transition in his career, bringing his expertise in transformer-based architectures to another leading AI research organization.
Views on AI and Society
Shazeer has expressed pragmatic views on artificial general intelligence (AGI), stating he does not "particularly care about AGI in the sense of wanting something that can do absolutely everything a person can do." When asked in 2023 if he feared AGI could destroy the world, he replied, "No. Not yet. [...] We're going to work on it as the technology improves." He has also commented on the lack of full understanding of why large language models work, saying, "My best guess is divine benevolence [...] Nobody really understands what's going on. This is a very experimental science [...] It's more like alchemy or whatever chemistry was in the Middle Ages."
Shazeer has also voiced opinions on social issues, including gender-reassignment surgery for children, stating, "I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children." These views have sparked discussion given his prominence in the AI field.
Personal Life
Shazeer is an Orthodox Jew. His sister was ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew College. He is married to Yael Shacham Shazeer and is the father of three children. His background and personal beliefs have occasionally intersected with his public statements on technology and society.