This is what you call a PR hire.
Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
141–150 of 478 posts
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
What? If I call someone a thief, I should be able to point to something they stole.
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#143[flagged]
Maybe he's preparing the next aquihire for Google ?
C'mon people, if you don't know Noam personally, who are you to fling such accusations?
I really hate the low bar of HN discussions lately. It's late-Slashdot-level. Brrr.
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
i dont keep up on this stuff so maybe i am missing some context. should he have been obligated to stay at google for the rest of his career?
Google essentially (but not exactly) aqui-hired Shazeer from character.ai in a deal that cost them $2.7B, with Shazeer personally making something in the region of $1B from it. Presumably there was some sort of retention period specified in the contract (you are not going to pay $2.7B to hire someone, then let them leave with no penalty the next day), but in the event Shazeer only stayed for 22 months before now leaving. Maybe he paid some penalty for leaving, but if so presumably more than compensated for by OpenAI.
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#145Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#146Some 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…
> Exciting times!
What is exiting about this?
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
what's the context behind this?
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#148[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...
Is this genuinely confusing for people? He helped invent the transformer, he didn’t solve content moderation.
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#149Earlier 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…
The original traitorous eight who left Shockley to found Fairchild semiconductor are what literally gave Silicon Valley its name. You want to keep valuable employees, you got to treat them really well. Given the number of tech giants coming out of silicon valley, there's something to that being a cornerstone of its culture.
Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI
#150Question one: How much did this cost OpenAI? Question two: Why are OpenAI spending that money taking talent from Google, who can definitely outspend them for talent, and not Anthropic, who are leading the market and are at least somewhat financially constrained.
Reporting on this seems to indicate that people at Anthropic are significantly more loyal, and that attempts to poach by OpenAI and Meta have been largely unsuccessful.
Their options are probably insane sunk cost, hard to steal an engineer who has Xm in potential gains if they choose to stay.