OpenAI Hires Transformer Co-Inventor Noam Shazeer from Google and Former White House Official Dean Ball

OpenAI hired Noam Shazeer from Google DeepMind this week. Shazeer co-authored the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need” and is a co-inventor of the Transformer architecture. He also co-led Google’s Gemini project and founded Character AI.

Shazeer had worked at Google since 2000, except for a three-year period when he left to start Character AI. 7 billion deal that gave the company access to Character AI’s technology. Shazeer announced his departure from Google on Wednesday.

OpenAI also hired Dean Ball, who worked in the White House last year and helped publish America’s AI Action Plan. Ball previously served as a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. He will join OpenAI on July 6 as leader of a new team called Strategic Futures and will report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon.

Ball posted on X on Thursday to announce the start date. The team’s mandate covers catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and relations between frontier labs, governments, and society. Ball wrote that the group will address both public policy and internal governance.

President Donald Trump ordered an export control ban on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models late last week. Anthropic removed the models to avoid noncompliance. TechCrunch reported that OpenAI is adding senior staff ahead of its planned public offering.