Noam Shazeer is a co-author of “Attention Is All You Need” whom Google paid $2.7 billion to reacquire in 2024. In this corpus he appears first as the Google researcher who put the odds at 50/50 that Gemini rather than a human generates the next breakthrough, the newsletter’s marker for the onset of recursive self-improvement. He returns in June 2026 when OpenAI poached him and Alphabet lost $250 billion in a day on his and John Jumper’s departures.
Person
Noam Shazeer
Transformer co-author and senior Google AI researcher who put even odds on Gemini, not a human, making the next major breakthrough; poached by OpenAI in June 2026.
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- Welcome to December 19, 2025 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)
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