OpenAI is hiring Noam Shazeer and Dean Ball ahead of its planned public offering. The company confidentially filed for an initial public offering earlier this month.

Noam Shazeer announced his departure from Google on Wednesday. Shazeer served as Google vice president of engineering and co-lead of its Gemini AI models. He worked at Google from 2000 to 2021 before co-founding Character AI, then returned to Google in August 2024. Google acquired Character AI in a $2.7 billion deal, which facilitated the return of both Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas to Google. De Freitas co-founded Character AI with Shazeer in 2021 after Google declined to pursue a chatbot project they had advocated for.

Shazeer co-authored the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture. Google management deleted internal messaging board posts by Shazeer regarding transgender identity and the Israel-Gaza war. "I'm excited to share that I'll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there," Shazeer said. "It was a difficult decision to move on. I'm incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we've built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you," Shazeer said.

Dean Ball will join OpenAI on July 6 as the leader of a new team named Strategic Futures. Ball will report directly to OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. "I am pleased and honored to announce that, on July 6, I'll be joining OpenAI as leader of a new team called Strategic Futures," Ball stated. The Strategic Futures team will focus on catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and relationships between frontier labs, governments, and society. Ball worked in the White House during the Trump administration last year, where he helped publish the America's AI Action Plan. He served as a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation before joining the company.

No independent assessment was available for this report.