OpenAI is bringing some big names to the team in the run-up to its public debut: Google DeepMind AI legend Noam Shazeer and former Trump White House AI policy official Dean Ball.
Shazeer, co-leader of Gemini and founder of AI role-playing startup Character AI, He announced his departure on Wednesday. He’s worked at Google since 2000, only leaving for three years when he left to co-found Character AI. Two years ago, Google rehired Shazier in a $2.7 billion deal that gave the tech giant access to the startup’s technology.
The move is the latest in a series of mix-ups among top AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. Shazier is credited with being one of the founding minds behind modern generative artificial intelligence. He co-authored the groundbreaking 2017 paper “Attention is All You Need,” which introduced the transformer architecture.
Before leaving Google, Shazier was also reportedly courting controversy when it came to political issues. according to information, Shazier expressed his opinions on internal message boards about transgender identity and the Israeli war on Gaza which led to the administration deleting his posts.
It remains to be seen whether these controversies will follow him to his new employer. Meanwhile, OpenAI is also bolstering its political credentials by bringing Paul into the team. Paul spent a brief stint last year in the White House, where he helped roll out America’s AI action plan before stepping down to rejoin the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow at the tech libertarian think tank.
“I am thrilled and honored to announce that on July 6, I will be joining OpenAI as the leader of a new team called Strategy Futures.” Paul wrote on X on Thursday. “Our mission will be to help company leadership shape frontier AI policy.”
Paul will report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The “small, high-level team of agencies” will focus on “issues related to catastrophic risk, iterative self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between frontier laboratories, governments (particularly the U.S. federal government), and society,” Paul wrote in an article. Blog post.
He added that the Strategic Futures team will cover public policy and internal governance. The latter is important, as Paul noted that “almost by necessity,” AI labs will have to lead AI governance decisions.
“In other words, Internal governance “It will be more important to the future of AI than most people realize,” Paul wrote.
Paul’s decision to join OpenAI – arguably one of the administration’s favorite companies – comes as humanity battles once again with the US government. Late last week, President Donald Trump ordered an export ban on Anthropic’s newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, resulting in the AI company having to remove the models entirely to avoid non-compliance. For anyone who has had “government interference” on their S-1 risk factor bingo card, the ball is what it looks like when a company locks in its internal position while a competitor is squeezed.
TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for more information.
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