# Noam Shazeer

> Noam Shazeer is a computer scientist, Character.AI co-founder, and OpenAI researcher whose work spans Google Search, mixture of experts, the transformer, large-model infrastructure, and conversational AI products. After co-leading Google Gemini, he joined OpenAI in 2026 to lead architecture research.

- **Role:** Architecture research lead at OpenAI
- **Organizations:** OpenAI, Google, Character.AI
- **From:** Philadelphia, United States
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Bachelor of Science, Duke University
- **Known for:** 1994 International Mathematical Olympiad gold medal with a perfect 42/42 score., Co-author of the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the transformer., Co-author of the sparsely gated mixture-of-experts architecture.

## Career timeline

- **1994** — Earned a gold medal and a perfect 42/42 score at the International Mathematical Olympiad as a member of the US team.
- **1997** — Ranked 20th in the Putnam Mathematical Competition as a Duke undergraduate.
- **2000** — Joined Google and later worked on Search spelling correction and the PHIL algorithm behind early AdSense.
- **2017** — Co-authored the mixture-of-experts and transformer research papers.
- **2018–2019** — Worked on Mesh TensorFlow, T5, and multi-query attention.
- **2021** — Left Google and co-founded Character.AI with Daniel de Freitas.
- **2022** — Character.AI launched its public beta; the company reported a billion words generated per day two months after launch.
- **2024** — Returned to Google as a Gemini co-technical lead after a licensing agreement with Character.AI.
- **2026** — Elected to the National Academy of Engineering and joined OpenAI to lead architecture research.

## Achievements

- 1994 International Mathematical Olympiad gold medal with a perfect 42/42 score.
- Co-author of the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the transformer.
- Co-author of the sparsely gated mixture-of-experts architecture.
- Contributed to Mesh TensorFlow, T5, LaMDA, and multi-query attention.
- Co-founded Character.AI with Daniel de Freitas.
- Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2026.

## Latest updates

- **2026-06** — Announced a move from Google Gemini to OpenAI; OpenAI research leadership said he would lead architecture research.
- **2026-02** — Elected to the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to transformer and mixture-of-experts architectures.
- **2025-08** — Delivered a Hot Chips keynote on his language-model research and computing hardware.

## Links

- Website: https://www.noamshazeer.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noam-shazeer-3b27288
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/NoamShazeer
- GitHub: https://github.com/noamshazeer

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/noam-shazeer
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29