AI Inventors

Noam Shazeer - Co-author of Transformers Paper

By Kamal Kashyap • Jul 02, 2026
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Noam Shazeer is a prominent software engineer. He is a co-author of the groundbreaking Transformer paper and co-founded Character.AI.

Introduction

Noam Shazeer is a highly respected American software engineer. He was one of Google's first deep learning researchers and co-authored the Transformer architecture paper in 2017.

Transformer & Google

Shazeer co-wrote "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the self-attention mechanism that underpins all modern LLMs. He later built LaMDA and led character chatbot research inside Google.

Character.AI & Google Return

In 2021, Shazeer left Google to co-found Character.AI, a platform for roleplay and user-created chatbots. In 2024, Google licensing agreements brought Shazeer back to Google's AI leadership team.

Noam Shazeer
Noam Shazeer
Noam Shazeer
Company Google / Character.AI
Country United States
Born November 20, 1976 (age 49)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Education Duke University
Notable work Transformer Architecture ("Attention Is All You Need"), Character.AI, LaMDA
Title Co-founder of Character.AI & Google VP

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