Noam Shazeer
Co-author of the transformer paper and co-founder of Character.AI
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Noam Shazeer is an American software engineer who co-wrote “Attention Is All You Need”, the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture behind modern chatbots. He co-founded Character.AI in 2021 and returned to Google in 2024 to co-lead work on Gemini.
Biography
Shazeer studied mathematics and computer science at Duke University and joined Google in 2000, where he improved its spell-checker and ad-targeting systems.
Transformers
In 2017 he was one of eight authors of “Attention Is All You Need”; colleagues credit him with key ideas such as multi-head attention. He also pioneered sparse mixture-of-experts models and helped build the LaMDA chatbot.
Character.AI
Frustrated that Google would not release LaMDA publicly, he and Daniel De Freitas founded Character.AI in 2021, letting users chat with customisable characters.
Return to Google
In 2024 Google licensed Character.AI’s technology and rehired Shazeer, reportedly in a $2.7 billion deal, to co-lead Gemini.
Timeline
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2000
Joins Google
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2017
Transformer paper; mixture-of-experts paper
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2021
Leaves Google; co-founds Character.AI
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2022
Character.AI launches
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2024
Returns to Google
Notable works
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2017
Attention Is All You Need Paper
With Vaswani and others.
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2017
Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer Paper
Did you know?
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1
He won gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1994.
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2
His early Google spell-checker was famous internally.
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3
All eight transformer authors later left Google, though he returned.
Connections
Frequently asked
Who is Noam Shazeer?
Noam Shazeer is an American software engineer who co-wrote “Attention Is All You Need”, the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture behind modern chatbots. He co-founded Character.AI in 2021 and returned to Google in 2024 to co-lead work on Gemini.
Where is Noam Shazeer from?
Noam Shazeer was born in United States.
What is Noam Shazeer known for?
Noam Shazeer is best known for “Attention Is All You Need” (2017); mixture-of-experts models; Character.AI; Gemini co-lead.
References
- Noam Shazeer — Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Noam Shazeer — IMDb. IMDb. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Official website. www.noamshazeer.com. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Noam Shazeer (Q30251943) — structured data. Wikidata. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
Includes material from the Wikipedia article “Noam Shazeer”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. That text is available under the same licence. Learn more
External links
About this profile
- Researched by the TrackFame editorial team; reviewed by Sanjay Sokal under our editorial policy
- First published 4 November 2026
- Last updated
Cite this page
“Noam Shazeer.” TrackFame, last updated 4 November 2026. https://trackfame.com/person/noam-shazeer
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