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.
Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
101–110 of 478 posts
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#102Very bad news for Gemini - the brief comeback with 2.5 Pro last year looked to be driven by Noam
Don't think it matters in the long run to be honest. The models have no moat, they are becoming a commodity. Besides that, Google is in a pretty good position, they're not bleeding money on AI like Anthropic/OpenAI, and they own product verticals where they can integrate it. Plus they have a mature ads-model which is what might actually drive a bit of revenue for LLMs.
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Companies are not your friend who you need to be loyal to. There's a reason noncompetes are illegal in California.
Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity.
- This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out.
You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own.
- Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were working for him, but actually you were using the company resources to your sole benefit.
It's not about loyalty, it's about integrity.
It's the same type of people whom you hire and pay to develop a platform, and then they steal the code, and never deliver this platform to you. Terrible business practices, but isn't it how Facebook happened too ?
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#104Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#105Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#106Noam 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 a spellchecker" question and then him coming up with something better than the state-of-the-art, then basically delivering Google's spell corrector in his first 2-week Noogler project.
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had to make a guess, money played a role lol.
He is close or already a billionaire, not sure much more money will be do much heavy-lifting
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like there was a scene in Silicon Valley about a developer fantasy league.
Krazam already has a video covering this exact idea.
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies are not your friend who you need to be loyal to. There's a reason noncompetes are illegal in California.
Think of it like if this: Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity. - This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out. You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own. - Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were workin…
Unless you think that employees are like indentured servants, and Novo Nordisk owns not only Wegovy but the people who work on it.
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#110Some 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…
this character.ai? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3xgwyywe4o