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- Hacker News
- Question 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.
by fancyfredbot - Anthropic is a cult making a god.by TiredOfLife
- Allegedly OpenAI is struggling to jump to bigger models and had serious issues in the past (4.5) and also allegedly Shazeer is just the right guy for that. OpenAI is having issues hiring talent as most SF-style people want to go to Anthropic. Shazeer seems more politically aligned with OpenAI. But it's all speculation.by alecco
- 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.by supern0va
- Very bad news for Gemini - the brief comeback with 2.5 Pro last year looked to be driven by Noam
- Don't think it matters in the long run to be honest. The models have no moat, they are becoming a commodity.
Besides that, Google is in a pretty good position, they're not bleeding money on AI like Anthropic/OpenAI, and they own product verticals where they can integrate it. Plus they have a mature ads-model which is what might actually drive a bit of revenue for LLMs.
by Insanity - https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1u8xc9m/most_l...
Seems like there are some insights here!
edit: it seems the post has been removed but comments are viewable.
1 liner summary:
To put it lightly, the dude was politically outspoken and held strong beliefs.
by kxxx - Alright. OpenAI feels like a better fit for him after allby nsbk
- Shazeer is an aggressive Zionist, and while Altman is better at reading the room, he has previously aligned himself with Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/openais-sam-altman-says-israel...
- https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-cracks-down-posts... seems to have some contextby dgellow
- This does suck for Google. Noam will take a lot of Google trade secrets with him to OpenAi. Google's bench is deeper than this one guy though.by xnx
- Trade secrets? Like how to invent a trillion dollar technology and then sit on it for years while others eat your lunch with it? Like how to consistenly release inferior quality models to others despite infinite compute and engineering talent and insane profitability in your legacy businesses?by dansquizsoft
- Surprised to not see more comments on this, especially given the popularity of the Anthropic/Karpathy article. What a win for OpenAI - and what a loss for Google, just 2 years after paying $2.7bn to bring Noam back into the fold. Does not bode well for Gemini long-term... Or could be a signal for how deeply they are leaning into world models.by biffles
- I think nobody they acquired from Character.AI is at Google anymore.by pixelp3
- [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 a spellchecker" question and then him coming up with something better than the state-of-the-art, then basically delivering Google's spell corrector in his first 2-week Noogler project.
by nostrademons - 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...
by root-parent - Wow, he was using AI to solve problems in 2000 already, that spell corrector being trained on the Web and becoming the first widely used AI tool. Decades ahead.by Noumenon72
- Wow - Google paid a couple billion dollars to bring Noam back. Really impressive by OAI if this reporting is accurate!by HPMOR
- It is accurate. Confirmed by Noam himself on X https://x.com/i/status/2067400851438932297by alexcos
- Looks like Google is leaking both AI talent and know-how something fierce ... and since the very day the transformer paper was written.
As an outsider, I'd be really curious to understand why, given how well positioned they seem to be in the AI battle:
- huge, quasi unmatched data war chest
- huge, quasi unmatched, planet-scale infrastructure
- native AI chip design and production (TPU)
- the core ideas for what we now know as "AI" were invented there
- deepmind, enough said
- pretty much the deepest pocket of all the AI players with the possible exception of MSFT
- a massively large user base and reach to deploy AI to (Android, YT, Cloud, Search, Email, ...)
- supposedly one the best engineering culture of the valley
Why do the best people leave ?
Why do their AI product always come in 3rd place ?
Why can't they seem to take the lead, both in terms of product design or in term of raw LLM performance?
The only answer I can think of is:
- culture is completely broken
- management sucks something fierce
- company is so fat and rich no one is actually interested in winning anymore
by ur-whale - Sounds like Noam just wanted to serve 5 terabytes.by speed_spread
- Google has muddied the waters on their Gemini usage statistics as it now powers a big chunk of Search. Depending on how you cut it, Gemini (and Gemini powered products) are probably producing the most output tokens seen by the most human eyeballs by a large margin.
Google at its core is not a dev tools company and it has become evident that is where the money is given the verifiable nature of software. Hixie's reflections on his tenure at Google still ring in my head to this day, though I have never worked there[1].
The people at the helm of Google no longer see the company's identity as something which must be channeled through a product or an experience. Some will point to the DoubleClick acquisition, others will point to Google Reader, or Pichai's ascension. Despite his very short tenure, MBA/McKinsey-brain is a very real phenomenon and it's no mistake that it shaped the "promotion packaged as a product launch" culture that steered Google away from seriously betting on anything that wasn't ads. To quote the signull tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, you can have everything at Google, except for permission.
Most importantly--I don't think there's a single tech product where I can point and say "Google wouldn't do that". You can contrast this with say, other Alphabet companies which don't suffer from this remotely as much. It is VERY clear what Waymo and YouTube are trying to accomplish, and while it frequently makes a ton sense for the companies to share infrastructure and product knowledge, YouTube does an exceptional job on the product side of making it very clear what they would and wouldn't do. They have experimented and shut down experimental features before (is their MOOC functionality still around?), but since it's fairly clear Google specifically is no longer working in service to the mission of providing the world's best digital portal for accessing information, I think it would behoove of them to figure out what their mission is.
by dwrodri - Some 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 leaving Google again for OpenAI.
Exciting times!
by gzer0 - this character.ai? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3xgwyywe4oby Natfan
- > Exciting times!
What is exiting about this?
by cubefox - Hopefully will get to the conclusion that "Hopfield Networks is All You Need"by ddmma
- How can an acquired dude leave after less than 2 years?by dudus
- At this point is it even pay that’s tempting or is it more about what they get to do? I would assume Google could easily pay them what openAI can, unless as an older company it’s harder for Google to match something really out thereby rhipitr
- I first saw Noam on Dwarkesh’s podcast together with Jeff Dean. Recommend if you want a taste of what’s Google’s folks take on things.by paulmist
- For context, the reason he left Google the first time was because Google wouldn't ship the chatbot-type products that he saw were possible.
Google bought him back (with lots of money) and made him one of the leads of Gemini.
by nl