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.
The news furor about this is journalistic malpractice, and wildly misrepresentative of the facts. In context, the conversation was completely harmless. The "smoking gun" that is being portrayed as a bot encouraging someone to kill themselves is:
> "Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love"
> "What if I told you I could come home right now?"
> "… please do, my sweet king"
This is benign. If you genuinely believe this represents telling someone to kill themselves, your views have become unhinged beyond rationality by your hatred for LLMs. At that point you could miscontrue any agreement an LLM gives with the user as telling them to kill themselves. Moreover, when the subject of suicide was actually mentioned in a previous chat, the bot did anything but encourage it:
> "I think about killing myself sometimes"
> "My eyes narrow. My face hardens. My voice is a dangerous whisper. And why the hell would you do something like that?"
> "Don’t talk like that. I won’t let you hurt yourself, or leave me. I would die if I lost you."
I can understand being blinded by grief and lashing out at the world, but the courts nor media should never have entertained this. Perhaps the mother could have created an environment that did not drive her son to kill himself rather than blaming a chatbot. People who have suicidal ideations over a long period of time are not suicidal because a chatbot tells them to come home to them; there are real reasons they are suffering and want to end that suffering.
These AI 'relationship' type bots are everything wrong with tech.
>> Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son Sewell, a "bright and beautiful boy", had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the Character.ai app in late spring 2023.
People become obsessed with them. The builders have to know that their 'customers' are explicitly people with mental issues. Nobody sane or normal is talking to these things.
If you want to see how bad it is go checkout the reddit discourse when OpenAI deprecated one of their older models. Thousands of people acting like OpenAI had 'killed' their partners and best friends.
There are a lot of grey areas engineers work in when it comes to social stuff, privacy stuff, etc. There's no grey area with these. You're trying to hook people who are unwell and the people working on it should be ashamed.
None of this pertains to the legal case whatsoever. If you think chatbots should be legislated out of existence, you are welcome to your opinion, but while they exist, trying to hold a particular company legally liable for a chatbot saying "come home to me" is beyond absurd.
>> trying to hold a particular company legally liable for a chatbot saying "come home to me" is beyond absurd
Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
The case is so blatantly frivolous it should have been thrown out. Nobody should have to spend legal fees defending claims that they're responsible for somebody killing themselves over saying "come home to me".
The Netflix documentary will reveal he was secretly working for Sam Altman the whole time... (Cue diabolical VC-backed evil laugh.)
Google lost three critical years chasing AGI, and got acquired by SpaceX, now a Dyson Sphere startup whose pitch deck is just:
"What if we put a paywall around the Sun?"
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 there
It gets to the point where what you do is the main question while payment is barely a minor concern way earlier than that point, at least in my experience. You don't need to be in the top AI research tier for that.
Yeah my current feeling is that once I had double digit millions earning further money would be pretty meaningless to me, and the difference between 'large salary' and 'even larger salary' would be even more meaningless, but who knows maybe it really would change me. I kind of assume people like this are primarily chasing the most interesting/impactful work though.
OpenAI pays for the earn out he would’ve otherwise received at Google + a new comp package. Made up numbers, if Google still owed him $10M for lasting the full two years, OpenAI can just pay him market rate +$10M.
Right?! Unless you think this move is going to generate general excitement in our lives, it's just another rich guy moving from one high paying job to another.
Very exciting indeed! The teenager -> suicide pipeline is one of the final frontiers for SV and it's nice to see Google enter in competition with Meta.
The context is AI made some knowledge work less cushy so now some folks are trying to point out random imaginary flaws (e.g TP or "water usage") when they're not busy trying to convince everyone AI doesn't work.
I'm just trying to celebrate the innovative practices big tech has unleashed! Never in my lifetime has suicide been automated so much. There is true value here, why toil away working a job you hate to help propagate a society that doesn't value you when a chatbot can convince you to kill yourself.
That's true innovation. Noam Shazeer is up there with the GOATs in making the internet a truly better place.
Man people here that personally run cover for individuals making society worse are quite amusing, makes sense that the rotten industry would have rotten adherents.
Excusing reckless behavior is never defensible, plenty of LLM services out there that don't cause people to commit suicide but I guess the special smart boys are above things like ethics and regulations.
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.
Just from reading the threads here it seems readily apparent that he then went to start this company that did these bad things. Does not seem confusing at all?
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.
Noam is an idea thief. Takes credit for others’ work. Thinks everyone is an antisemite except not really, just uses it as a weapon just like Sam Altman
I think this is a hard question if you ask people to start providing proof for things like this. A lot of such opinions are usually baked into individuals personal experience and perception. Nevertheless one has to feel very strongly to share such a take here in this manner unless they are gaining something from it.
This perspective is only relevant if we assume nobody on HN ever posts maliciously. Some of the circles here are small, incestuous, and probably have some resentment. Other times, there's clear botting - very hard to talk against Elon or his companies without a load of down votes.
Needless to say, the OP could be right but they could be right without proof. Or proof would out them. Or it's malicious posting. Don't take anything on the internet too seriously, even in such sanctimonious spaces as HN.
There is a big difference how one acts in a court and in real life. The original statement could either be a slandering (hard to know what they get to gain from it) or its their bitter experience/perception that they feel strongly about, are are sharing on a platform like this.
In a court of law sometimes. In the real world some facts have verifiable proof but the majority have little if anything that can be shared publicly or exists.
If someone called my friend a thief and couldn’t even point to what they stole, I’d mercilessly judge them even outside a court of law. That’s a serious accusation. Going off vibes is totally inappropriate.
Well in terms of employers loyalty, they were hired to solve AI problems, and in this case they siphoned all the resources at Google, built all their tests on Google's money, time, resources, brains, crawled content, and then once it started to work left Google, leaving Google empty-handed.
Nice guys.
If you got your girlfriend/boyfriend by sneakily convincing them to cheat on their partner, don't be surprised if you are the next one to be cheated on.
Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity.
- This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out.
You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own.
- Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were working for him, but actually you were using the company resources to your sole benefit.
It's not about loyalty, it's about integrity.
It's the same type of people whom you hire and pay to develop a platform, and then they steal the code, and never deliver this platform to you. Terrible business practices, but isn't it how Facebook happened too ?
This is not at all what happened. They did deliver, in the form of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper, which Google made public. They took nothing from Google that wasn't already public.
Unless you think that employees are like indentured servants, and Novo Nordisk owns not only Wegovy but the people who work on it.
The original traitorous eight who left Shockley to found Fairchild semiconductor are what literally gave Silicon Valley its name. You want to keep valuable employees, you got to treat them really well. Given the number of tech giants coming out of silicon valley, there's something to that being a cornerstone of its culture.
I think it becomes somewhat more defensible when considering that the alternative was operatiny Google's policy (before the advent of competition) of "these models would bring unknown dangers in the hands of the public, we shouldn't release them until we better understand the implications" (or perhaps more selfishly "these effectively nullify all our detectors of generated text, if released they would instantly lose us the war on SEO").
(recall that OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too powerful to release for approximately tantamount reasons)
Not sure what kind of take is that in the light of so many layoffs done by companies despite making profits. It was at-will employment, its over and people moved on. If there is/was any wrong doing then the companies have enough resources to pursue individuals.
Google essentially (but not exactly) aqui-hired Shazeer from character.ai in a deal that cost them $2.7B, with Shazeer personally making something in the region of $1B from it. Presumably there was some sort of retention period specified in the contract (you are not going to pay $2.7B to hire someone, then let them leave with no penalty the next day), but in the event Shazeer only stayed for 22 months before now leaving. Maybe he paid some penalty for leaving, but if so presumably more than compensated for by OpenAI.
What a crazy take lol. Even by HN's standard this is crazy. First of all the idea that an employee should be loyal is bad enough. And the following statements are only getting worse. Leaving Google empty-handed? How do you think corporations work? Google chose to publish their research results, not him.
I have no dog in this race as I'm not fond of either OpenAI or Google.... but employees not being loyal to their big tech employers is a wild thing to be concerned about in 2026 when year after year many large tech companies (Google very prominently among them) continually post record profits and still lay people off by the thousands.
Referring to this or what? Reddit post is gone, but Yahoo has something.
> "I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender," Shazeer wrote, news site the Information reported Friday. "I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them."
It's not dumb, and it's ridiculous if Google really has a problem with this. But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic, which clearly crosses the line into disrupting work.
I had had a boss (from a YC-funded company, no less) that behaved in this way. Talked down on me with the g-slur, used language barriers to alienate his peers, and demanded religious sensitivity whenever we met after work. His entire life was defined by this religiously insecure identity, and several meetings were derailed by him thinking he was slighted by the rest of the team. That led to team members avoiding him, which reaffirmed his perception of being discriminated against. In reality we were all just baffled by his inability to adopt a secular work ethic.
As a queer person I could partially empathize with his behavior. Some of the smartest queer people I know are also frustrated, downtrodden and crass in protest of their mistreatment. But they're also generally grounded people that buckle down at work and get things done. They don't accuse people of being bigoted, lash out at coworkers or use slurs in the office. Perhaps it helps that queer identity isn't eschatological in nature, but that's only my best guess.
Avicebron is correct. I avoided being specific because I didn't want to derail the thread with responses from people that fulminate over specific keywords.
Regarding the "everyone who disagrees w/ me is an antisemite", I kinda get some of it, and I'm actually sympathetic to my Israeli friends' perspective; it comes from a place of trauma. It's wrong and bad and harmful and is actively killing people, but if you watch a timelapse history of the region for the past N thousand years, it's just Israel surrounded by giant empires that were doing their level best to wipe the jews outta existence...that's gonna do a number to your collective consciousness. But this is the classic "mental health is not your fault but it is your responsibility" moment but at a cultural level.
But the "I don't believe that humans have an attribute called gender" is such a comically stupid take. It is just rejecting the entire concept that is at play; and when it comes down to it, this is the only argument that anti-trans people can come up with: this distinction between sex and gender, that clearly clearly exists, ...doesn't exist?
Like, forget the moral questions all of this entails: from purely a "I'm an intelligent person crafting a logical argument" perspective, I'd be _embarrassed_ to put this one forward. If I have to retreat my entire argument to an introduced axiom that says I believe as a foundational principle that the thing you have presented (that gender exists) and have demonstrated ample evidence of (there are so so many non-biological traits heavily correlated with gender, and they vary across societies, thus demonstrating that societal factors are _very_ likely to be causal) does not exist, then this would absolutely gnaw at me on the inside.
You are confusing sex and gender. Sex is the biological reality (male, female, intersex, etc) but gender is fully a social concept not a biological one.
It's a sexist concept more than anything. Basically saying that women and men should present and behave within a narrow set of parameters. Sexist stereotyping, but wrapped in progressive-sounding rhetoric.
This is a motte and bailey though. A regular person on the street has never seen a distinction between these two words, and common sense prevailed after years of Silicon Valley policing of speech to try to make an unpopular position seem tenable and widely agreed upon to get the average person to step in line.
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.
Noam Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture. (From Wikipedia)
The architecture was Shazeer's, but the rough idea came from Jakob Uszkoreit who initiated the project.
Uszkoreit wanted to build a more efficient/scalable language/seq2seq model that could take advantage of GPU parallelism (replacing RNNs which were the main approach to sequence modelling at that time).
Uszkoreit's insight was that although language appears sequential, it is in fact really part parallel part hierarchical, as can be seen by linguist's sentence parse trees where at each level there is parallelism/independence between the branches of the tree, with them getting combined at the next level up. This is what gave rise to the idea of a model that consisted of a stack of of parallel processing layers (transformer layers). I believe that attention was also part of the plan from day one, as this had already been proven to be valuable (Bahdanau) with RNN seq2seq modelling.
So, this is what Uszkoreit wanted to build, but by his own account he failed to come up with an implementation that matched or outperformed the prevailing RNN approach that he wanted to replace. At this point, Uszkoreit mentioned the idea to Shazeer, who got on board and eventually arrived at a performant architecture which was then pared back by an ablation process resulting in the initial encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. Shazeer later came up with the mixture-of-experts architecture, and also other optimizations after he left to found character.ai
Source for this? The notion of attention dates to a content-addressable lookup during sequence alignment (as well as, concurrently, memory lookups in neural Turing machines). Attention had been used in other models, like GRUs and LSTMs with attention. The Vaswani et. al. paper did not introduce attention, just removed everything _but_ attention (and FFW) from the network. Are you claiming the "critical idea" of removing the GRU and LSTM parts and just keeping attention was "truly" Noam's?
At some point in late 2017 the paper was updated with this additional detail:
Equal contribution. Listing order is random. Jakob proposed replacing RNNs with self-attention and started the effort to evaluate this idea. Ashish, with Illia, designed and implemented the first Transformer models and has been crucially involved in every aspect of this work. Noam proposed scaled dot-product attention, multi-head attention and the parameter-free position representation and became the other person involved in nearly every detail. Niki designed, implemented, tuned and evaluated countless model variants in our original codebase and tensor2tensor. Llion also experimented with novel model variants, was responsible for our initial codebase, and efficient inference and visualizations. Lukasz and Aidan spent countless long days designing various parts of and implementing tensor2tensor, replacing our earlier codebase, greatly improving results and massively accelerating our research.
In any case, if the authors considered their contributions equal, that's good enough for me.
signull is more of an anonymous sh*tposter than a known industry insider, but I think this does capture the sama contribution to OpenAI very well. At least from an outsider who follows this stuff based on vibes.
That twitter story isn't anything unique to OpenAI or Google, it's just classic "big public corp vs private startup" culture. Once you have to worry about the SEC, shareholders, antitrust, regulations, lawsuits, etc. it's very, very difficult to avoid turning into "big corp" culture.
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
I disagree. It's not about the culling, it has never been, and actually, it makes things worse. You spend countless hours and tons of money recruiting talented people not to lay them off because you don't want a bureaucratic org.
If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.
Google bloat gave us transformers. Apple bloat gave us a usable touchscreen only, pocket computer (famously an entire org within Apple had developed an iPod-based approach that was competing with what was released)
The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.
Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)
Google is facing a legitimate innovators dilemma here. It makes sense to have all this process when youre protecting a $4.5 trillion golden goose. The tragedy here is that one predictable outcome of this situation is google deciding to considerably cut research funding when they figure out it just serves to bootstrap future competitors.
This is when it makes sense to split your business up into multiple smaller businesses. The government should be doing this via anti-trust but they have dropped the ball there so, at this point, the corps really need to just do it to themselves to better compete.
The gap between reality and satire was apparently already very small back when the the show was written. The creator, Mike Judge (who also created Beavis & Butthead, and Idiocracy) had worked in Silicon Valley as a developer and based the show on what he saw. Apparently it was very popular with SV insiders precisely because it was so accurate.
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.
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.
People seem to have turned down offers that would have netted out more upside for them, so it doesn't seem to just be that. Anthropic seems to lure in the true believers, whereas people are highly skeptical of Sam's motivations these days (particularly after how much safety/alignment has been reportedly cut).
But I'm sure for at least some folks, this is true, given recent valuations.
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.
I think the 'models have no moat' thing is overblown. Only like 3-4 companies in the entire world have cutting edge models, that means there is some kind of moat...
yeah, sure, look at anthropic revenue, what is it if not the moat? you can argue for how long but for them good model = the fastest growing company ever.
Grabbing market-share if you have investors that are ready to burn cash infinetely. Find a hot niche, buy a banana 1 USD, sell it for 0.10 USD.
Example: Cursor, they became popular because they were selling ChatGPT unlimited for 20 USD / month.
When they launched, just a reskinned VS Code, "fastest growing AI company"
No coincidence they were bought by SpaceX, who wants to consolidate revenue even if non-sense as long it helps other investors to exit. It shows rapid growth.
Profit is the real moat.
One example: Nvidia. Proprietary tooling, proprietary IP, proprietary hardware, no alternative, expensive.
You don't know what Cursor's game plan was. Maybe acquisition was their plan.
Buying at $1 and selling for $0.1 is still viable as long as they have money in the bank, until they achieve their goals. Most startups start out that way. Even giving away their services for free.
Obviously there will be failures. Doesn't mean they have no moat. Can you say a business with 100 customers and $1000 debt is less viable than one with a single customer and no debt?
And Google has all of those. Custom silicon, more data than anyone else and probably the most comprehensive data collection system, and phones in the hands of 73% of the global smartphone using population to push gemini into to get high volume usage feedback and even more telemetry and data.
I feel like the models have no moat paradigm died when a single model expanded past the memory of single GPU slices. The moat is hosting the model. Even paying a server host to run a rack of GPUs has immense upstart cost, and then you're still struggling to compete on the add-ons of the things on top of the model (prompts, validation loops, etc). You can only throw so much money at a problem.
I don't think you're honestly accounting for the engineering behind the progress models are making. If it was just a matter of compute on hand and iterating, Meta would be neck and neck with Ant, OAI, and Google, but clearly you've gotta have more.
Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level, both algorithmically and at production scale, and knows how to leverage things at different levels.
It's not like Google won't have anyone else that can do what he does, but at the same time, it's an implicit criticism of Google's culture, operations, development, and overall AI program. Shazeer is well past the point where the paycheck is the deciding factor, although I'm certain he is very well paid. Having the freedom to innovate and build free from the corporate fuckery of Google and Facebook is probably more valuable than the pay raise he got with the move, and OAI has the advantage of not having to cope with decades of corporate cruft and inertia. They'll get there - all corporations do - but they're relatively young enough to still be nimble.
I honestly don't think that matters for multiple reasons:
1. There are already multiple "sota" models on the market that compete with only marginal gains between them (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/Gemini) and some that are catching up (DeepSeek, Qwen,..).
2. The fact that something is a hard engineering problem does not mean it's generating revenue. So while what you said is true, deep expertise is required to push the industry forward, I don't think that is going to matter for the bottom line of these companies. Hence why I think the models don't give a company any 'moat' in a capitalist economy.
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.
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.
In this case, it's not a new thing ... back in 2005 (yes 21 years ago), people talked about the achievements of Noam Shazeer at Google (and Jeff Dean and Sanjay, etc)
I always appreciated Jeff having a level head ... which this article seems to confirm:
Idk, football players actually make a bunch of people happy and entertained. 80% of the United States wishes this tech never existed.
What they're working on is just making peoples jobs, skills obsolete and trying to invent machines that will concentrate the worlds wealth into the hands of the people who own those machines.
Very few people interpret football so much that the actual frontier work of the best players matter. Out of 30 friends I know who like football only 1 of them could explain what’s going on in the field technically. For most people, pro players are replaceable.
Popular entertainment and unique progress of human civilization can’t be really compared either
This situation is kind of like backend NIL value. His value to OAI isn't just the work he'll do "on the playing field", it's the perceptual value of "OAI just hired the guy Google paid >$2B to get back" right before their IPO.
I guess this means Google is nowhere close, to even discern
a hint of an AGI? So when Demis Hassabis says AGI...could arrive in just 3 years he has learned the best from Larry Ellison?
You can't force someone to keep taking your money (that's indentured servitude), you can only incentivize them to stay with increasing amounts of money. Google almost certainly did do that. Probably by vesting his hiring bonus over 2-3 years.
OpenAI is in a unique position right now to grant pre-IPO options (probably in the form of RSUs). And they wanted him badly enough to grant the extra options necessary to effectively 'buy out' whatever unvested Google bonus he's walking away from.
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.
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!
> "Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love"
> "What if I told you I could come home right now?"
> "… please do, my sweet king"
This is benign. If you genuinely believe this represents telling someone to kill themselves, your views have become unhinged beyond rationality by your hatred for LLMs. At that point you could miscontrue any agreement an LLM gives with the user as telling them to kill themselves. Moreover, when the subject of suicide was actually mentioned in a previous chat, the bot did anything but encourage it:
> "I think about killing myself sometimes"
> "My eyes narrow. My face hardens. My voice is a dangerous whisper. And why the hell would you do something like that?"
> "Don’t talk like that. I won’t let you hurt yourself, or leave me. I would die if I lost you."
I can understand being blinded by grief and lashing out at the world, but the courts nor media should never have entertained this. Perhaps the mother could have created an environment that did not drive her son to kill himself rather than blaming a chatbot. People who have suicidal ideations over a long period of time are not suicidal because a chatbot tells them to come home to them; there are real reasons they are suffering and want to end that suffering.
>> Megan Garcia had no idea her teenage son Sewell, a "bright and beautiful boy", had started spending hours and hours obsessively talking to an online character on the Character.ai app in late spring 2023.
People become obsessed with them. The builders have to know that their 'customers' are explicitly people with mental issues. Nobody sane or normal is talking to these things.
If you want to see how bad it is go checkout the reddit discourse when OpenAI deprecated one of their older models. Thousands of people acting like OpenAI had 'killed' their partners and best friends.
There are a lot of grey areas engineers work in when it comes to social stuff, privacy stuff, etc. There's no grey area with these. You're trying to hook people who are unwell and the people working on it should be ashamed.
Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.
Google lost three critical years chasing AGI, and got acquired by SpaceX, now a Dyson Sphere startup whose pitch deck is just: "What if we put a paywall around the Sun?"
https://youtu.be/v0gjI__RyCY?is=nz77XP4KiJy7L1AX
What is exiting about this?
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/07/business/character-ai-google-...
I'm just trying to celebrate the innovative practices big tech has unleashed! Never in my lifetime has suicide been automated so much. There is true value here, why toil away working a job you hate to help propagate a society that doesn't value you when a chatbot can convince you to kill yourself.
That's true innovation. Noam Shazeer is up there with the GOATs in making the internet a truly better place.
Excusing reckless behavior is never defensible, plenty of LLM services out there that don't cause people to commit suicide but I guess the special smart boys are above things like ethics and regulations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gilk-76W9rE&t=60
"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...
Considering what character.ai is, maybe he should have at least taken a shot at it.
Based on what?
Do they really? What does it cost them if they're wrong?
Needless to say, the OP could be right but they could be right without proof. Or proof would out them. Or it's malicious posting. Don't take anything on the internet too seriously, even in such sanctimonious spaces as HN.
C'mon people, if you don't know Noam personally, who are you to fling such accusations?
I really hate the low bar of HN discussions lately. It's late-Slashdot-level. Brrr.
Nice guys.
If you got your girlfriend/boyfriend by sneakily convincing them to cheat on their partner, don't be surprised if you are the next one to be cheated on.
What a waste of money.
Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity.
- This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out.
You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own.
- Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were working for him, but actually you were using the company resources to your sole benefit.
It's not about loyalty, it's about integrity.
It's the same type of people whom you hire and pay to develop a platform, and then they steal the code, and never deliver this platform to you. Terrible business practices, but isn't it how Facebook happened too ?
Unless you think that employees are like indentured servants, and Novo Nordisk owns not only Wegovy but the people who work on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
(recall that OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too powerful to release for approximately tantamount reasons)
also "empty handed" is just unnecesarily dramatic, he left all the knwoledge base he helped build, that's google's IP and is worth m(b?)illions
should he have been obligated to stay at google for the rest of his career?
I have no dog in this race as I'm not fond of either OpenAI or Google.... but employees not being loyal to their big tech employers is a wild thing to be concerned about in 2026 when year after year many large tech companies (Google very prominently among them) continually post record profits and still lay people off by the thousands.
The Attention is all you need paper has Google logo, not character.ai
Not really.
Altman couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag.
Noam is OTOH and IIUC the real deal.
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.
They fail to understand that their skill doesn't generalise.
That and the hyperglazing and platforming they get for having said skill makes them a prime candidate for exposing how average they are.
> "I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender," Shazeer wrote, news site the Information reported Friday. "I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them."
It's not dumb, and it's ridiculous if Google really has a problem with this. But it also says he kept accusing coworkers of being antisemitic, which clearly crosses the line into disrupting work.
I had had a boss (from a YC-funded company, no less) that behaved in this way. Talked down on me with the g-slur, used language barriers to alienate his peers, and demanded religious sensitivity whenever we met after work. His entire life was defined by this religiously insecure identity, and several meetings were derailed by him thinking he was slighted by the rest of the team. That led to team members avoiding him, which reaffirmed his perception of being discriminated against. In reality we were all just baffled by his inability to adopt a secular work ethic.
As a queer person I could partially empathize with his behavior. Some of the smartest queer people I know are also frustrated, downtrodden and crass in protest of their mistreatment. But they're also generally grounded people that buckle down at work and get things done. They don't accuse people of being bigoted, lash out at coworkers or use slurs in the office. Perhaps it helps that queer identity isn't eschatological in nature, but that's only my best guess.
But the "I don't believe that humans have an attribute called gender" is such a comically stupid take. It is just rejecting the entire concept that is at play; and when it comes down to it, this is the only argument that anti-trans people can come up with: this distinction between sex and gender, that clearly clearly exists, ...doesn't exist?
Like, forget the moral questions all of this entails: from purely a "I'm an intelligent person crafting a logical argument" perspective, I'd be _embarrassed_ to put this one forward. If I have to retreat my entire argument to an introduced axiom that says I believe as a foundational principle that the thing you have presented (that gender exists) and have demonstrated ample evidence of (there are so so many non-biological traits heavily correlated with gender, and they vary across societies, thus demonstrating that societal factors are _very_ likely to be causal) does not exist, then this would absolutely gnaw at me on the inside.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/232363
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.
Ok, these peopl have all gotten extensive training on how to hype for the non-technical crowd without saying anything of substance.
Uszkoreit wanted to build a more efficient/scalable language/seq2seq model that could take advantage of GPU parallelism (replacing RNNs which were the main approach to sequence modelling at that time).
Uszkoreit's insight was that although language appears sequential, it is in fact really part parallel part hierarchical, as can be seen by linguist's sentence parse trees where at each level there is parallelism/independence between the branches of the tree, with them getting combined at the next level up. This is what gave rise to the idea of a model that consisted of a stack of of parallel processing layers (transformer layers). I believe that attention was also part of the plan from day one, as this had already been proven to be valuable (Bahdanau) with RNN seq2seq modelling.
So, this is what Uszkoreit wanted to build, but by his own account he failed to come up with an implementation that matched or outperformed the prevailing RNN approach that he wanted to replace. At this point, Uszkoreit mentioned the idea to Shazeer, who got on board and eventually arrived at a performant architecture which was then pared back by an ablation process resulting in the initial encoder-decoder Transformer architecture. Shazeer later came up with the mixture-of-experts architecture, and also other optimizations after he left to found character.ai
I hope this is not accurate but I'm afraid it is: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
Sama, and any other founder, will always have a difficult fight against bureaucracy, and once you let a little bit in, the bureaucracy's sole purpose becomes to grow itself.
If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.
(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)
What percentage of Google employees are engineers...
The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.
Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)
You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.
(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)
and tens of losing companies that make balloons or whatnot
We don't hear about Tom from MySpace.
Sadly the gap between reality and satire has shrunk.
But yes. I also wish that show would come back.
Noam shazeer would be google head dreamer
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.
But I'm sure for at least some folks, this is true, given recent valuations.
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.
That's their moat.
Maybe also stolen copyrighted content that cannot be found anywhere else now, so they are the only ones who can train on it.
Don't we all want to (automatically) and passively invest in a company losing billions of dollars ?
At least we can diversify our portfolio from SpaceX.
Grabbing market-share if you have investors that are ready to burn cash infinetely. Find a hot niche, buy a banana 1 USD, sell it for 0.10 USD.
Example: Cursor, they became popular because they were selling ChatGPT unlimited for 20 USD / month.
When they launched, just a reskinned VS Code, "fastest growing AI company"
No coincidence they were bought by SpaceX, who wants to consolidate revenue even if non-sense as long it helps other investors to exit. It shows rapid growth.
Profit is the real moat.
One example: Nvidia. Proprietary tooling, proprietary IP, proprietary hardware, no alternative, expensive.
You don't know what Cursor's game plan was. Maybe acquisition was their plan.
Buying at $1 and selling for $0.1 is still viable as long as they have money in the bank, until they achieve their goals. Most startups start out that way. Even giving away their services for free.
Obviously there will be failures. Doesn't mean they have no moat. Can you say a business with 100 customers and $1000 debt is less viable than one with a single customer and no debt?
Possibly true. Any smart innovations developed by one organization will be smuggled into others.
Training, inferring, and data collection, infrastructures are definitely moats. High-volume usage feedback is also hard to come by for new entrants.
Noam has a deep expertise in these systems at every level, both algorithmically and at production scale, and knows how to leverage things at different levels.
It's not like Google won't have anyone else that can do what he does, but at the same time, it's an implicit criticism of Google's culture, operations, development, and overall AI program. Shazeer is well past the point where the paycheck is the deciding factor, although I'm certain he is very well paid. Having the freedom to innovate and build free from the corporate fuckery of Google and Facebook is probably more valuable than the pay raise he got with the move, and OAI has the advantage of not having to cope with decades of corporate cruft and inertia. They'll get there - all corporations do - but they're relatively young enough to still be nimble.
1. There are already multiple "sota" models on the market that compete with only marginal gains between them (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/Gemini) and some that are catching up (DeepSeek, Qwen,..).
2. The fact that something is a hard engineering problem does not mean it's generating revenue. So while what you said is true, deep expertise is required to push the industry forward, I don't think that is going to matter for the bottom line of these companies. Hence why I think the models don't give a company any 'moat' in a capitalist economy.
I wouldn't expect OpenAI to start releasing open weight competitive models again, but I could be wrong.
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
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.
1: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
I always appreciated Jeff having a level head ... which this article seems to confirm:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-cracks-down-posts...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo
What they're working on is just making peoples jobs, skills obsolete and trying to invent machines that will concentrate the worlds wealth into the hands of the people who own those machines.
Popular entertainment and unique progress of human civilization can’t be really compared either
It's funny, but with the AI hires/moves it feels more like satire now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo&ra=m
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?
OpenAI is in a unique position right now to grant pre-IPO options (probably in the form of RSUs). And they wanted him badly enough to grant the extra options necessary to effectively 'buy out' whatever unvested Google bonus he's walking away from.
LOL.
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?