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Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

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Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#131

Post by beng-nl »

busymom0 wrote: post #79
gniv wrote: post #10

Wow. What could possibly have caused him to quit so soon after coming back? I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273

This reads like an episode of Silicon Valley. I wish that show was rebooted, they'd have so much funny material nowadays.

I loved that show. The love that went into it really shows.

Sadly the gap between reality and satire has shrunk.

But yes. I also wish that show would come back.

Noam shazeer would be google head dreamer

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#132

Post by ur-whale »

mrandish wrote: post #117
ur-whale wrote: post #94

Silver lining: given the leaked financials of OpenAI, he might very well be joining a sinking ship. Also, why didn't they nail him down contractually when they bought character.ai ... isn't that pretty standard with these type of superstar (re)hires?

You can't force someone to keep taking your money (that's indentured servitude), you can only incentivize them to stay with increasing amounts of money. Google almost certainly did do that. Probably by vesting his hiring bonus over 2-3 years. OpenAI is in a unique position right now to grant pre-IPO options (probably in the form of RSUs). And they wanted him badly enough to grant the extra options necessary to effect…

Yah, I guess Cali doesn't allow non-competes or something like that.

LOL.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#133

Post by root-parent »

nostrademons wrote: post #106

[Edit: note that my comment was reparented, it was originally a response to someone claiming Noam was another "Scam Altman". I don't mind the reparenting or the killing of the original subthread, but I feel like this is necessary context to understand this.] Noam is the real deal, he was pretty legendary within old-time ('00s) Google engineering. Paul Buchheit had a story about interviewing him with the "how to write…

If he is supposedly extremely smart, then surely he would have known what he was doing. So how can anyone claim all this was just an accident?

"Google and Character.AI agree to settle lawsuits over teen suicides" - https://www.axios.com/2026/01/07/google-character-ai-lawsuit...

Be aware...very disturbing: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/e2e8fc50-a9ac...

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#134

Post by Computer0 »

kxxx wrote: post #45

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1u8xc9m/most_l... Seems like there are some insights here! edit: it seems the post has been removed but comments are viewable. 1 liner summary: To put it lightly, the dude was politically outspoken and held strong beliefs.

[flagged]

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#135

Post by sandeepkd »

highfrequency wrote: post #126
ctdinjeu7 wrote: post #121

[flagged]

> idea thief. Takes credit for others’ work. Based on what?

I think this is a hard question if you ask people to start providing proof for things like this. A lot of such opinions are usually baked into individuals personal experience and perception. Nevertheless one has to feel very strongly to share such a take here in this manner unless they are gaining something from it.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#136

Post by mrandish »

bookofjoe wrote: post #57
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #27

Its getting pretty lame that we talk about the these guys like they're football players transferring teams.

What's the AI equivalent of NIL?

This situation is kind of like backend NIL value. His value to OAI isn't just the work he'll do "on the playing field", it's the perceptual value of "OAI just hired the guy Google paid >$2B to get back" right before their IPO.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#137

Post by sandeepkd »

rvnx wrote: post #69
tomalbrc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Not sure what kind of take is that in the light of so many layoffs done by companies despite making profits. It was at-will employment, its over and people moved on. If there is/was any wrong doing then the companies have enough resources to pursue individuals.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#138

Post by mlmonkey »

For those interested, Wired ran a backstory about the Attention is All You Need paper 2 years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-...

It gives some context on the contributions of each of the authors. About Shazeer, from the article:

Shazeer’s joining the group was critical. “These theoretical or intuitive mechanisms, like self-attention, always require very careful implementation, often by a small number of experienced ‘magicians,’ to even show any signs of life,” says Uszkoreit. Shazeer began to work his sorcery right away. He decided to write his own version of the transformer team’s code. “I took the basic idea and made the thing up myself,” he says. Occasionally he asked Kaiser questions, but mostly, he says, he “just acted on it for a while and came back and said, ‘Look, it works.’” Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” he had taken the system to a new level.

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

#140

Post by paulmist »

gzer0 wrote: post #48

Some context for people who haven’t followed the full loop: Shazeer was a long-time Google researcher, joined Google in 2000, and was one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need.” He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead. Now he’s…

I first saw Noam on Dwarkesh’s podcast together with Jeff Dean. Recommend if you want a taste of what’s Google’s folks take on things.

https://youtu.be/v0gjI__RyCY?is=nz77XP4KiJy7L1AX

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