It gives some context on the contributions of each of the authors. About Shazeer, from the article:

Shazeer’s joining the group was critical. “These theoretical or intuitive mechanisms, like self-attention, always require very careful implementation, often by a small number of experienced ‘magicians,’ to even show any signs of life,” says Uszkoreit. Shazeer began to work his sorcery right away. He decided to write his own version of the transformer team’s code. “I took the basic idea and made the thing up myself,” he says. Occasionally he asked Kaiser questions, but mostly, he says, he “just acted on it for a while and came back and said, ‘Look, it works.’” Using what team members would later describe with words like “magic” and “alchemy” and “bells and whistles,” he had taken the system to a new level.

I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273

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!

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gilk-76W9rE&t=60

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.

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.

Because I think as far as running the existing models and handling whatever nuances, it must be well understood by oai and ANT -- but you don't what you don't know.

Karpathy to Anthropic, now Noam to OpenAI.

And Deepminds Demis Hassabis was the single other? Or were there more?

So didn’t they get on? The latter is in London so time difference to put up with too

What is going on at Google?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo&ra=m

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

I doubt that the money had anything to do with it.

I also doubt that the state of the technology at OAI vs. Google had much to do with it, Google is behind no doubt, but the gap is not as far as we know, insurmountable.

I suspect that this is a leadership clash. Noam was working in GDM. GDM somehow went away from coding and RSI into "world models" and that has played out very poorly. Who made that call? Who was still playing politics?

Given this is Noam the list of people that could be pissing him off is very small: Demis, Sergey (?!), a couple of VPs in GDM.

What the hell happened?

Also, why didn't they nail him down contractually when they bought character.ai ... isn't that pretty standard with these type of superstar (re)hires?