AI arms race intensifies! OpenAI rushes towards a trillion-dollar valuation before IPO, poaching star researchers from Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US).

Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US) famous researcher Noam Shazeer announced his resignation and joining of OpenAI, causing a significant blow to Alphabet Inc. Class C in the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race. Currently, OpenAI is actively pushing forward with its IPO plans, with a potential overall valuation expected to exceed 1 trillion US dollars. Shazeer had previously co-authored a groundbreaking paper that pushed forward the development of the AI industry. He announced his resignation on Thursday on social platform X. His joining is seen as a major victory for OpenAI, which is competing with Anthropic PBC and is focused on developing more advanced models before its IPO. OpenAI executives and investors expect the company to go public as early as this fall. Competitor Anthropic has also submitted an IPO application this month. OpenAI's Chief Research Officer Mark Chen stated that Shazeer will be leading the research on AI architecture at the company, focusing on developing solutions for building large models. Shazeer also expressed on social media that he looks forward to working with the "outstanding team" at OpenAI. Shazeer's departure comes at a crucial moment for Alphabet Inc. Class C, as the company is in fierce competition in the AI race with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk's SpaceX. From developing large models and accompanying chips, to consumer-level applications for billions of users, Alphabet Inc. Class C's extensive layout in the field of AI has gained favor from investors, leading to a significant rise in its stock price in recent months. However, in terms of selling AI programming tools to businesses, Alphabet Inc. Class C lags behind its competitors. Several former employees revealed that internal researchers at the company must navigate complex internal political games to access computing resources. In 2017, Alphabet Inc. Class C's team published the paper "Attention Is All You Need," introducing the Transformer architecture that supports today's generative AI, with Shazeer being one of the co-authors. According to Shazeer's personal website, he joined Alphabet Inc. Class C in 2000 and made key contributions to the company's search engine spell-check system and advertising technology. In 2021, due to Alphabet Inc. Class C's slow progress in developing generative AI products, he left Alphabet Inc. Class C and founded the startup company Character.AI specializing in chatbots and automation. In 2024, Alphabet Inc. Class C reached an agreement with his company, valuing the startup at 2.5 billion US dollars, leading to Shazeer's return to Alphabet Inc. Class C and heading the development of Alphabet Inc. Class C's flagship large model Gemini. An Alphabet Inc. Class C spokesperson wrote in an email, "We thank Noam for his significant contributions to Alphabet Inc. Class C over the years and wish him all the best."