Tech news in 3 minutes
OpenAI is bringing on some big guns in the lead-up to its IPO
OpenAI is bolstering its team ahead of its public debut, hiring two prominent figures: Google DeepMind AI legend Noam Shazeer and former Trump White House AI policy official Dean Ball. Shazeer, a co-lead of Google's Gemini and founder of AI role-playing startup Character AI, announced his departure from Google on Wednesday. He had been at Google since 2000, leaving for three years to co-found Character AI. Two years ago, Google rehired Shazeer in a $2.7 billion deal for access to the startup's technology. Shazeer co-authored the seminal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture. However, he reportedly stirred controversy on internal messaging boards regarding transgender identity and Israel's war in Gaza, leading to management deleting his posts. It remains unclear if those controversies will follow him to OpenAI. Meanwhile, OpenAI is strengthening its policy credentials by bringing on Dean Ball. Ball had a brief stint in the White House last year, helping publish America's AI Action Plan, before rejoining the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow. On Thursday, he announced on X that he will join OpenAI on July 6 as leader of a new "Strategic Futures" team, reporting directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The team will focus on catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between frontier labs and government, especially the U.S. federal government. Ball emphasized that internal governance will be crucial for AI labs. Ball's move comes as rival Anthropic battles the U.S. government over an export control ban on its latest models. OpenAI's hires signal a strategic push to lock in insider status while competitors face regulatory pressure.