OpenAI is bringing on some big names to the team in the lead-up to its public debut: Google DeepMind AI legend Noam Shazeer and former Trump White House AI policy official Dean Ball.
Shazeer, a co-lead at Gemini and the founder of AI role-playing startup Character AI, announced his departure on Wednesday. He had been at Google since 2000, leaving only for a three-year period when he left to co-found Character AI. Two years ago, Google re-hired Shazeer in a $2.7 billion deal that gave the tech giant access to the startup’s technology.
The move is the latest in a series of shufflings between the top AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Shazeer is credited for being one of the foundational minds behind modern generative AI. He co-authored the seminal 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture.
Before leaving Google, Shazeer had also reportedly been stirring the pot when it came to political issues. According to The Information, Shazeer voiced opinions on internal messaging boards on transgender identity and Israel’s war in Gaza that resulted in management deleting his posts.
Whether those controversies will follow him to his new employer remains to be seen. In the meantime, OpenAI is also shoring up its policy credentials by bringing Ball to the team. Ball had a brief stint last year in the White House, where he helped publish America’s AI Action Plan before stepping down to rejoin the techno-libertarian think tank the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow.
“I am pleased and honored to announce that, on July 6, I’ll be joining OpenAI as leader of a new team called Strategic Futures,” Ball wrote on X on Thursday. “Our mandate will be to help the company’s leadership shape frontier AI policy.”
Ball will report directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The “small, high-agency team” will focus on “matters pertaining to: catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between the frontier labs, governments (particularly the U.S. Federal Government), and society,” Ball wrote in a blog post.
The Strategic Futures team will cover both public-facing policy and internal governance, he added. That last is important — Ball noted that “almost by necessity,” AI labs will have to lead on AI governance decisions.
“In other words, internal governance will be more central to the future of AI than most people realize,” Ball wrote.
Ball’s decision to join OpenAI — arguably an AI favorite in the administration — comes as Anthropic battles once again with the U.S. government. Late last week, President Donald Trump ordered an export control ban on Anthropic’s latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, leading to the AI firm being forced to take the models down entirely to avoid noncompliance. For anyone who had “government interference” on their S-1 risk factor bingo card, Ball is what it looks like when a company locks in its insider status while a rival is squeezed.
TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for more information.
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