Noam Shazeer

Noam Shazeer
Born1976 (age 49–50)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
EducationDuke University (BS)
Known forTransformer
SpouseYael Shacham
Children3
Scientific career
Fields
Workplaces
Websitenoamshazeer.com

Noam Shazeer (born 1975 or 1976)[1] is an American Software Engineer and entrepreneur known for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and deep learning, particularly in the development of transformer models and natural language processing. He lives in Palo Alto, California.[2]

Early life and education

Shazeer's grandparents emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel, eventually emigrating to the USA.[2] His father, Dov Shazeer, was a math teacher who became an engineer[2] and his mother was a homemaker.[3]

Shazeer was born in Philadelphia, attended grade school at Cohen Hillel Academy in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and attended Swampscott High School in Swampscott, Massachusetts.[4] He won a gold medal with perfect score at International Mathematical Olympiad 1994 as a member of the US team.[4][5]

He went on to study math and computer science at Duke University[2] in Durham, North Carolina from 1994 to 1998.[3] At Duke he was a recipient of the Angier B. Duke Memorial Scholarship,[6] and, as part of the Duke math team, won prizes in the Putnam Competition.[2][7][8] He started studying in a graduate program in Berkeley but soon left to be one of Google's first employees.[2]

Shazeer is an orthodox Jew.[2][3][9] His sister was ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew College.[2] He is a father of three and is married to Yael Shacham Shazeer.[2]

Career

Noam Shazeer joined Google in 2000. One of his first major achievements was improving the spelling corrector of Google's search engine.[1] In 2017, Shazeer was one of the authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need",[10][11][1] which introduced the transformer architecture.

At Google, Shazeer and his colleague Daniel de Freitas built a chatbot named Meena.[1] Following the refusal of Google to release the chatbot to the public, Shazeer and Freitas left the company in 2021 to found Character.AI.[1][12]

In September 2023, Time Magazine chose Shazeer as one of the 100 most influential people in the AI world.[13]

In August 2024, it was reported that Shazeer would be returning to Google to co-lead the Gemini AI project.[14] Shazeer was appointed as technical lead on Gemini, along with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals.[15] It was part of a $2.7 billion deal for Google to license Character's technology.[1][16] Since he owns 30-40% of the company, it is estimated he netted $750 million–$1 billion.[16] In 2026, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.[17]

In June 2026, Shazeer announced that he would leave Google to join OpenAI. At the time, he was a vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini artificial intelligence models.[18]

Views

Shazeer said about artificial general intelligence that he doesn't "particularly care about AGI in the sense of wanting something that can do absolutely everything a person can do”.[19] When asked in 2023 if he is afraid that AGI will destroy the world, he said: "No. Not yet. [...] We’re going to work on it as the technology improves".[6]

When asked why do large language models work he answered: "My best guess is divine benevolence [...] Nobody really understands what’s going on. This is a very experimental science [...] It’s more like alchemy or whatever chemistry was in the Middle Ages.”[19]

Shazeer has opined on gender-reassignment surgery for children: "I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children."[20]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Miles Kruppa; Lauren Thomas (September 25, 2024). "Google Paid $2.7 Billion to Bring Back an AI Genius Who Quit in Frustration". The Wall Street Journal WP-WSJ-0002072218. ISSN 0099-9660. Wikidata Q130363626. Retrieved September 25, 2024.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 וולמן (Wellman), ישראל (Israel) (August 29, 2024). "נועם שזיר, האיש ששווה לגוגל 2.5 מיליארד דולר" [Noam Shazir, the man who is worth $2.5 billion to Google]. Ynet (in Hebrew). Retrieved March 5, 2025.
  3. 1 2 3 טרבלסי, נבו (October 24, 2024). "בגיל 48 הוא הרוויח מאות מיליוני ד'. המודל שלו עומד לשנות את העולם". Globes. Retrieved March 5, 2025.
  4. 1 2 Dillon, Sam (July 20, 1994). "Perfect Score for Americans in World Math Tourney". The New York Times.
  5. ↑ "Individual Results IMO 1994". www.imo-official.org.
  6. 1 2 Shazeer, Noam; Wang, Sarah (September 25, 2023). "Universally Accessible Intelligence". Andreessen Horowitz. Retrieved March 10, 2025.
  7. ↑ "Winners of the 1994 Putnam Competition". people.csail.mit.edu. Retrieved March 10, 2025.
  8. ↑ Klosinski, Leonard F.; Alexanderson, Gerald L.; Larson, Loren C. (1997). "The Fifty-Seventh William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition". The American Mathematical Monthly. 104 (8). Mathematical Association of America: 744–754. ISSN 0002-9890. JSTOR 2975240. Retrieved March 10, 2025.
  9. ↑ "הישראלי לשעבר וחלוץ ה-AI שחוזר לגוגל בעסקה של 2.5..." Channel 12 Israel. August 6, 2024. Retrieved March 5, 2025.
  10. ↑ Chen, Mia Xu; Firat, Orhan; Bapna, Ankur; Johnson, Melvin; Macherey, Wolfgang; Foster, George; Jones, Llion; Schuster, Mike; Shazeer, Noam; Parmar, Niki; Vaswani, Ashish; Uszkoreit, Jakob; Kaiser, Lukasz; Chen, Zhifeng; Wu, Yonghui (2018). "The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Recent Advances in Neural Machine Translation". Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics: 76–86. arXiv:1804.09849. doi:10.18653/v1/p18-1008.
  11. ↑ Ashish Vaswani; Noam Shazeer; Niki Parmar; Jakob Uszkoreit; Llion Jones; Aidan N. Gomez; Łukasz Kaiser; Illia Polosukhin (June 12, 2017). "Attention is All you Need" (PDF). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. arXiv:1706.03762. Wikidata Q30249683. Retrieved September 25, 2024.
  12. ↑ "Google takes another startup out of the AI race". The Verge. August 2, 2024.
  13. ↑ "TIME100 AI 2023: Noam Shazeer". Time. September 7, 2023. Retrieved March 10, 2025.
  14. ↑ Cai, Kenrick (August 22, 2024). "Google appoints former Character.AI founder as co-lead of its AI models". reuters.
  15. ↑ "Noam Shazeer returns to Google to co-lead Gemini AI project". ctech. August 27, 2024. Archived from the original on August 29, 2024. Retrieved August 31, 2024.
  16. 1 2 Erin Griffith; Cade Metz (August 8, 2024). "The New A.I. Deal: Buy Everything but the Company". The New York Times 100000009614776. ISSN 0362-4331. Wikidata Q130365833. Retrieved September 25, 2024.
  17. ↑ "National Academy of Engineering Elects 130 Members and 28 International Members" (Press release). National Academy of Engineering. February 10, 2026.
  18. ↑ "Google's Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to join OpenAI". June 18, 2026.
  19. 1 2 Garfinkle, Allie (August 2, 2024). "Character.AI's Noam Shazeer on what we know about AI—and what we don't". Fortune. Retrieved March 6, 2025.
  20. ↑ "Google's $2.7 Billion AI Hire Tests Company's Speech Limits With Inflammatory Posts". The Information.
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