OpenAI brings in two heavy hitters ahead of its IPO
OpenAI has hired Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the landmark 'Attention Is All You Need' paper, and Dean Ball, a former Trump White House AI policy official. Shazeer joins from Google DeepMind, while Ball will lead a new Strategic Futures team.
OpenAI is bolstering its ranks ahead of its anticipated initial public offering (IPO) by adding two notable figures: Noam Shazeer from Google DeepMind and Dean Ball, a former AI policy official in the Trump administration.
Noam Shazeer is a foundational figure in modern generative AI. He co-authored the seminal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture. Shazeer was a co-lead at Gemini and founder of AI role-playing startup Character AI. Two years ago, Google re-hired him in a $2.7 billion deal that gave the tech giant access to his startup's technology. His departure marks another shift among top AI labs like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
Shazeer also attracted attention for his political opinions. According to The Information, he voiced views on transgender identity and Israel's war in Gaza on internal messaging boards, leading management to delete his posts. Whether these controversies will follow him to OpenAI remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is strengthening its policy credentials with the addition of Dean Ball. Ball had a brief stint in the White House last year, where he helped publish America's AI Action Plan before leaving to join the techno-libertarian think tank Foundation for American Innovation. Starting July 6, he will lead OpenAI's new Strategic Futures team, reporting directly to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon.
Ball explained that the "small, high-agency team" will focus on catastrophic risk, recursive self-improvement, labor market impact, and the relationship between frontier labs and governments, particularly the U.S. federal government. The team will cover both public-facing policy and internal governance. Ball noted that internal governance will be more central to AI's future than most realize.
This hiring comes as Anthropic faces renewed pressure from the U.S. government. President Donald Trump recently ordered an export control ban on Anthropic's latest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, forcing the company to take them down entirely.
