OpenAI is adding Google Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer and former White House AI adviser Dean Ball as the company strengthens its research and policy teams ahead of a potential public listing.
Shazeer is joining OpenAI after leaving Google, while Ball will lead a newly created Strategic Futures team focused on frontier AI policy, internal governance, and the relationship between AI laboratories and governments.
Shazeer Leaves Google for OpenAI
Shazeer announced his departure from Google on Wednesday. He had worked at the company since 2000, apart from a three-year period when he left to co-found AI chatbot company Character.AI.
Google brought Shazeer back in 2024 through a licensing agreement reportedly valued at about $2.7 billion. The arrangement gave Google access to Character.AI’s technology and brought several members of its research team into the company.
Before leaving, Shazeer served as a vice president of engineering and co-led development of Google’s Gemini models. His move adds to the competition among OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Meta for experienced AI researchers.
Shazeer was also a co-author of the influential 2017 research paper “Attention Is All You Need”, which introduced the Transformer architecture that supports many modern generative AI systems.
Ball Will Lead Strategic Futures Team
Ball said he will join OpenAI on July 6 as head of Strategic Futures. The new team will report to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon and advise company leaders on policy concerning advanced AI systems.
Its work will cover catastrophic risks, recursive self-improvement, employment effects, and interactions among AI companies, governments, and society. Ball said the team will contribute to both public policy discussions and OpenAI’s internal governance.
Ball previously worked in the Trump White House, where he helped develop the administration’s AI Action Plan. He later returned to the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow.
He has argued that frontier AI companies will inevitably make important governance decisions because government regulation may not develop as quickly as the technology. Ball said internal governance at AI laboratories will therefore have a larger influence on the industry than many observers expect.
The appointments come as the US government increases its involvement in advanced AI systems. Anthropic recently disabled access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after authorities directed it to prevent foreign nationals, including some employees, from using the models.
Featured image credits: ishmael daro via Flickr
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