Much is made of artificial-intelligence bottlenecks like power, chip packaging and memory. But periodically investors get a reminder that one of the scarcest AI resources is top talent.
Enter Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer, who announced late Wednesday on X that he was leaving the Alphabet GOOGL unit Google to join OpenAI, less than two years after he was rehired by Google as part of a $2.7 billion deal. Then on Friday, a Google DeepMind vice president, John Jumper, a Nobel Prize winner, announced he, too, would leave Alphabet and take a job at the Claude developer Anthropic.
In an environment where being first is everything, “there are not many individuals that have the experience, the knowledge and the track record in really shaping and helping define where AI models and progress is going,” Evan Schlossman, a principal at SuRo Capital, told MarketWatch, in discussing Shazeer’s departure. The publicly traded venture firm SSSS has an investment in OpenAI.
Shazeer left Google in 2021 after a chatbot he built was not released by the company, according to the Wall Street Journal, and founded the startup Character.AI. During his first stint at Google, Shazeer had co-authored a research paper introducing the Transformer, which laid the foundation for current large language models.
Though Schlossman said it’s not clear what exactly motivated Shazeer’s latest move, talent at his level “tend to want to go where they believe they are going to be able to make meaningful contributions, and [to] companies that are at the forefront.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X that Shazeer “is one of the people I have most wanted to work with since the very beginning” of OpenAI.
D.A. Davidson managing director Gil Luria said Shazeer’s departure from Google “is a significant loss” for the company’s AI efforts.
It may not make a material impact on Google’s finances in the short term, Luria said, but “it does reduce the likelihood it can stay at the forefront of AI development.” That could change how investors feel about the stock, he told MarketWatch in emailed comments.
Schlossman pointed to Alphabet’s $4.5 trillion market capitalization as a sort of insurance for the company, which he noted is still well-resourced and full of talent.
“We are grateful for Noam’s meaningful contributions to Google over the years and we wish him well,” a Google spokesperson told MarketWatch.
Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, congratulated Shazeer in a reply on X. And Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis thanked Jumper, saying that their work together “changed the world, and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine.”
Harrison Rolfes, a senior research analyst at PitchBook, said that moves between labs are common for AI researchers. He pointed to Anthropic’s hiring of OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy in May.
Shazeer’s hiring is “another massive cost that OpenAI is taking on,” Rolfes told MarketWatch, in the sense that there’s a risk he does not perform how the AI startup wants him to at the speed it needs leading into a hotly anticipated initial public offering.
But similarly to SuRo’s Schlossman, Rolfes said that despite a growing pool of researchers, there are a limited number who understand how to scale and build products at the level of Shazeer.
Rolfes sees a hidden layer to his hiring, too.
While OpenAI is likely upgrading its talent pool to support its IPO ambitions, Rolfes said he thinks “they are looking for a new wave of people to create a new product.” He expects that to be hardware or a product that consumers can use, he said.
Shazeer didn’t respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment, while OpenAI referred to a tweet from Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, saying he was “very excited to welcome” Shazeer.