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AI Lately
Live · The Signal · W37
Monday, September 14, 2026
AI Lately

AI is about people, and what they have been up to lately.

Lately
Fidji SimoNscaleas Independent Director· Sep 11Josh EngelsMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Joe BentonMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Alan DuongCrux AIas Chief Development Officer· Sep 10Paul ChristianoOpenAI Foundationas Board Member, Safety and Security Committee· Sep 9Jacob CoxonIndependentas Independent AI Safety Advocate· Sep 8Geoffrey IrvingMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8Paul ChristianoMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8Fidji SimoNscaleas Independent Director· Sep 11Josh EngelsMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Joe BentonMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Alan DuongCrux AIas Chief Development Officer· Sep 10Paul ChristianoOpenAI Foundationas Board Member, Safety and Security Committee· Sep 9Jacob CoxonIndependentas Independent AI Safety Advocate· Sep 8Geoffrey IrvingMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8Paul ChristianoMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8

Person

Noam Shazeer

Lately: OpenAI as Researcher, from Google.

Public record only: name, role, employer, source, and date.

Recorded moves

  1. Noam Shazeer → OpenAI as Researcher, from Google (Gemini Co-Lead)

    A repeat departure that a nine-figure retention deal failed to prevent signals compensation alone cannot secure loyalty at the frontier-research tier.

    hireconfirmedCNBC: Google Gemini Co-Lead Noam Shazeer Leaves for OpenAIJun 18, 2026

  2. Noam Shazeer → Google DeepMind as AI Leader, Google DeepMind, from Character.AI (Chief Executive Officer)

    Google's first use of the license-and-hire structure, reclaiming talent it had let walk away three years earlier.

    acquihireconfirmedCNBC: Ex-Google engineers who founded Character.AI rejoin company with AI partnershipAug 2, 2024

In the archive

  • Hiring & Talent

    The Biggest AI Hires of 2025

    Meta's $14.3 billion Scale AI deal, OpenAI's C-suite rebuild, and Google's Windsurf license turned 2024 and 2025 into a two-year auction for AI's rarest asset: the researchers themselves.

  • Hiring & Talent

    The Biggest AI Hires of 2026 (So Far)

    Fidji Simo relinquished her post as OpenAI's second-in-command to illness, Noam Shazeer and three Google veterans departed together to found a rival, and John Ternus rose to Apple's helm, rewriting AI's leadership map in 2026.

  • Hiring & Talent

    OpenAI's Org Chart in Motion

    Fidji Simo's July 2026 exit, Kevin Weil's departure from OpenAI for Science, and Noam Shazeer's arrival from Google trace a company shedding experiments to concentrate on enterprise AI and frontier research.

  • Hiring & Talent

    Google DeepMind's Retention Playbook

    A $2.4 billion Windsurf acquihire, Koray Kavukcuoglu's promotion and Demis Hassabis's step-back from chief executive trace how Google answered an exodus that sent Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer toward rivals.

  • Hiring & Talent

    The Compensation Revolution

    Meta's nine-figure packages and a run of license-and-hire deals worth billions, from Microsoft's Inflection buyout to Google's Windsurf pickup, show incumbents paying for entire research teams while structuring around the merger review a straight acquisition would trigger.

  • Frontier Models

    GPT-5 and the Cadence Behind It

    OpenAI shipped GPT-5 and an open-weight sibling two days apart, then kept a numbered cadence running through 2026 while Jakub Pachocki, Mark Chen, Jerry Tworek and new arrival Noam Shazeer redrew the research org underneath it.