OpenAI Hires Transformer Co-Author Noam Shazeer and Former White House AI Official Dean Ball Ahead of IPO

OpenAI has recruited two high-profile figures as it prepares for its public market debut: Noam Shazeer, one of the foundational architects of modern generative AI, and Dean Ball, a former Trump White House AI policy official.

Shazeer announced his departure from Google DeepMind on Wednesday after more than two decades at the company, interrupted only by a three-year period during which he co-founded AI role-playing startup Character AI. Google rehired him in 2024 through a $2.7 billion deal that gave it access to Character AI’s technology. Shazeer is credited as a co-author of the landmark 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture underpinning virtually all modern large language models. At Google, he served as co-lead on the Gemini model family.

Ball, who helped shape the United States’ AI Action Plan during a stint at the White House before returning to the Foundation for American Innovation, will join OpenAI on 6 July to lead a newly formed team called Strategic Futures, reporting to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The team’s remit will span catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labour market impact, and the relationship between frontier AI labs and governments, covering both public-facing policy and internal governance.

The twin hires arrive as rival Anthropic faces a government-imposed export control ban on its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, underscoring the growing importance of political positioning among leading AI laboratories ahead of what is expected to be a consequential period for frontier AI regulation.