Sam Altman is celebrating what he’s almost insinuating is a potential homecoming for Noam Shazeer, as Google’s top artificial intelligence researcher just quit his role to join OpenAI.

Google’s vice president of engineering and co-lead of its Gemini AI models announced Wednesday (US time) that he is leaving the Sundar Pichai-led tech empire to join Altman’s OpenAI. Taking to his official X account, Noam 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 honor and a pleasure to work with all of you.”

Google, in turn, acknowledged Shazeer’s departure, saying, “We are grateful for Noam’s meaningful contributions to Google over the years.” This marks his second exit from the company within a few years.

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Sam Altman celebrates Noam Shazeer’s Google exit

His decision shocked many, especially since he is the same AI genius Google paid $2.7 billion less than two years ago to bring him back after he quit the company in frustration, according to The Wall Street Journal. Altman, on the other hand, couldn’t help but rejoice seeing Shazeer’s announcement as his company won this round amid an ongoing race for AI talent.

“Noam is one of the people I have most wanted to work with since the very beginning of OpenAI,” Altman wrote in response to Shazeer’s tweet. “Only took 10 years. I think it will be worth the wait!”

The news of Shazeer’s much-awaited OpenAI arrival has gone viral as the 2015-founded company is preparing for its Nasdaq debut. Earlier this month, the ChatGPT maker confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO).

On the other hand, the top AI star’s Google exit comes after the tech giant showcased brand-new AI products, including the Gemini 3.5 Flash model and Gemini Spark AI agent, at its annual I/O developer conference in May amid tight competition with rivals OpenAI and Anthropic.

Why did Noam Shazeer quit Google?

OpenAI has finally poached one of the brains behind Google’s AI vision two years after Google managed to rehire him as part of a $2.7 billion deal. Although Shazeer hasn’t publicly revealed the reason for his second exit from Google, he and his colleague Daniel De Freitas first quit the company in 2021 to start one of the most intriguing AI startups, Character.AI, a chatbot that generates human-like messages from custom-built personas.

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According to The Wall Street Journal, the two Character.AI founders left Google after the company sidetracked their attempts to push forward a chatbot named Meena. Named one of the 100 most influential people in the AI world by Time Magazine in 2023, the co-author of a seminal research paper (“Attention Is All You Need”) that kicked off the AI boom ultimately returned to Google—alongside Freitas—in 2024.

Upon his return, Shazeer stepped up as the co-lead of the development efforts behind the Gemini AI project, which helped Google run the same race as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Shazeer first joined Google as a software engineer in 2000, according to his LinkedIn profile. Although the timeline of his resignation remains unclear, his announcement comes in the same month as Google’s director of Android Platform Security, Rene Mayrhofer, published a lengthy resignation letter on his blog. Even he underscored that the decision was “incredibly hard,” but he was left with no choice but to say farewell because the company’s management “has lost its moral compass,” he wrote in reference to Google’s Pentagon AI deal.