OpenAI is bringing on some big names to the team within 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 founding father of AI role-playing startup Character AI, announced his departure on Wednesday. He had been at Google since 2000, leaving just 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 most recent in a series of shufflings between the highest AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. Shazeer is credited for being one among 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 got here to political issues. In accordance with 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 recent employer stays to be seen. Within the meantime, OpenAI can also be shoring up its policy credentials by bringing Ball to the team. Ball had a temporary stint last yr within the White House, where he helped publish America’s AI Motion Plan before stepping right down to rejoin the techno-libertarian think tank the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow.
“I’m pleased and honored to announce that, on July 6, I’ll be joining OpenAI as leader of a brand new team called Strategic Futures,” Ball wrote on X on Thursday. “Our mandate shall be to assist the corporate’s leadership shape frontier AI policy.”
Ball will report on to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The “small, high-agency team” will deal with “matters pertaining to: catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the connection 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 each public-facing policy and internal governance, he added. That last is vital — Ball noted that “almost by necessity,” AI labs could have to guide on AI governance decisions.
“In other words, internal governance shall be more central to the long run of AI than most individuals realize,” Ball wrote.
Ball’s decision to affix OpenAI — arguably an AI favorite within the administration — comes as Anthropic battles once more 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, resulting in 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 an organization locks in its insider status while a rival is squeezed.
TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for more information.
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