Latest / YPO Technology Network AI Brief
The Transformer's Author Just Defected
The week that asked who controls AI ends by zooming all the way in — to the individual. On June 17, Noam Shazeer, co-author of the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer (the architecture under ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude) and co-lead of Google's Gemini, announced he is leaving Google for OpenAI — less than two years after Google paid a reported $2.7 billion to bring him back from Character.AI. Peers call it the most significant AI talent move of the year, and the lesson for leaders is sharp: in a field where the scarcest input is talent, retention of your two or three irreplaceable…
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