Noam Shazeer

If there is one paper that split the history of artificial intelligence in two, it is "Attention Is All You Need," published in 2017. Noam Shazeer was one of its eight authors, and the only one who had already been at Google for 17 years when he signed it. He joined the company in 2000, fresh out of Duke with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, back when Google still fit in a garage. He spent two decades as one of the quietest and most productive minds in the company's history.

The 2017 paper introduced the Transformer architecture, the building block behind virtually all generative AI that exists today: GPT, Gemini, Claude, LLaMA. Before that, Shazeer had already left his mark on web search, spell-checking, and internal language models. But the Transformer was the moment a high-altitude technical idea changed the direction of the entire field. He is also co-author of key work on Mixture of Experts (MoE), an architecture that allows models to scale efficiently and that today powers models like Gemini and, according to reports, GPT-4.

In 2021 he did something few dare to do: he left Google to co-found Character.AI alongside his colleague Daniel de Freitas. At a time when the world still did not know what ChatGPT was, they were already launching a Transformer-based conversational chatbot, before OpenAI opened its doors to the public. The bet paid off: Character.AI became one of the most popular conversational AI platforms in the world. In 2024, Google paid $2.7 billion to license Character.AI's technology and bring Shazeer back as VP of Engineering, leading the development of Gemini. TIME included him on its TIME 100 AI list in 2023.

The lesson I take from Noam Shazeer is that great contributions do not always arrive with fanfare. Two decades of quiet work at Google, a 12-page paper signed by eight people, and suddenly the entire world builds on that foundation. Every time you write a prompt, every time an AI understands and answers you, something of that discreet labor lives inside. Sometimes the revolution does not arrive announced with trumpets: it arrives signed by eight names on a PDF.