Founder Profile
Noam Shazeer
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Noam Shazeer?
Noam Shazeer is a founder of Character.ai, which was founded in 2021 with Daniel De Freitas.
- Company founded
- Character.ai
- Founded
- 2021
- Co-founders
- Daniel De Freitas
Background
Duke University graduate who joined Google in 2000, co-wrote 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017) and work on mixture-of-experts models, and worked on the Meena/LaMDA chatbot before leaving in 2021.
Founding Story
Noam Shazeer co-founded Character.ai in 2021 and was its CEO until August 2024, when he returned to Google under the licensing deal and became a co-lead of the Gemini models at Google DeepMind. He is one of the eight authors of the Transformer paper that underpins modern large language models. In June 2026 he left Google to join OpenAI.
Noam Shazeer was born in 1976 in Philadelphia.
Shazeer was born in 1975 or 1976 and lives in Palo Alto, California.