6/18: Medjourney - by Theo Jaffee - MTS

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6/18: Medjourney

Also: is OpenAI back now?

Theo Jaffee

Jun 18, 2026

4

It’s Thursday, monitors, and Gabriel is back in the Situation Room with us. GTA VI pre-orders will finally be starting next Thursday, so maybe we’ll actually get to play the game this year after all. As a Floridian, I look forward to seeing how accurate the map is. Be sure to catch us on X and YouTube, and join our Discord to chat with our hosts live.

Today’s Experts

Making Sense of the World

Is OpenAI back?

Yesterday, star researcher Noam Shazeer announced that he’s joining OpenAI. Given that OpenAI has been struggling to match Anthropic’s momentum for some time, this is a huge boon to the company. Some people don’t follow AI researchers like NBA players 1, so we’ll explain who Shazeer is and why he’s such a big deal.

In 2000, right after grad school, Shazeer joined a small Series A startup called Google. In his early days, he worked on spelling correction in search and a key algorithm behind Google’s advertising. In 2012, he joined Google Brain, the company’s internal AI research organization, at the very beginning of the deep learning revolution in the tech industry. Shazeer’s research at Brain focused on sequence prediction, language modeling, and scaling. In 2016, he co-discovered an early version of what would later become neural network scaling laws, and helped make mixture of experts work with large neural networks.

In 2017, he was one of the lead authors on perhaps the most important paper in AI history: “ Attention is all you need”, which introduced the transformer architecture that still powers every frontier model today. Though it wouldn’t release an LLM for some time, Google realized the potential of the transformer for things like Google Translate, so it sent Shazeer to work scaling them. He spent the next four years making multiple key advances that allowed transformers to be run bigger, faster, and cheaper. He was a major contributor to the team that built LaMDA, Google’s first conversational large language model that was so convincing (for the time) that it made one engineer think it was sentient.

In October 2021, Shazeer left Google to found Character.ai, a platform that allowed users to build custom chatbots in the image of various real and fictional characters. After ChatGPT came out and LLMs really started to take off, Character.ai became a breakout success. In 2024, Google ( sort of) acquired Character.ai for $2.7 billion, and appointed Shazeer co-lead of Gemini along with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals. Before Shazeer, Gemini was well behind OpenAI and Anthropic. Shazeer helped turn Gemini 2.5 Pro, 3 Pro, and 3.1 Pro into genuine frontier-class models, and made the Flash and Gemma series into highly competitive lower-cost options.

So why is Shazeer joining OpenAI as the new lead for architecture research so important? Because of the labs’ biggest goal for the next couple of years — recursive self-improvement. AI models can already meaningfully assist with AI research, and if trends continue, they may be able to fully automate AI research and trigger an intelligence explosion. If you believe what the labs believe, whoever wins the race to RSI wins everything. Aside from scaling compute and getting better data, the only way to improve models is through improving the algorithms, exactly what Shazeer excels at.

Also, Dean W. Ball, friend of the show and author of Hyperdimensional, is joining OpenAI to lead its new Strategic Futures team, advising the company’s leadership on frontier AI policy. He’s an incredible pick, OpenAI is lucky to have him, and we’ll be monitoring OpenAI’s policy work with great interest.