Noam Shazeer

Noam Shazeer holds a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and computer science from Duke University. He joined Google in 2000 as one of its earliest software engineers, spending over two decades at Google Brain where he co-authored 'Attention Is All You Need' (inventing the Transformer), pioneered Mixture of Experts (MoE), and co-created LaMDA.

Noam Shazeer is one of the most historically significant artificial intelligence researchers in the world and the co-founder of Character.ai. Shazeer spent decades as a principal engineer at Google, where his massive technical contributions completely altered the trajectory of global AI development. Most famously, he is a co-author of the legendary 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need,' which invented the Transformer architecture—the foundational technology powering every modern large language model. Frustrated by Google's massive bureaucracy and reluctance to release conversational AI, Shazeer left in 2021 with Daniel De Freitas to found Character.ai, focusing heavily on deeply engaging, personalized AI companions. In a highly unusual move, Google effectively 'acquired' his team in 2024 by paying billions to license the models and bring Shazeer back to co-lead their flagship Gemini efforts.