Noam Shazeer
AI Scientist, OpenAI. On 3 shows, 4 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
scientistengineerfounderexecutiveauthor@NoamShazeer ↗LinkedIn ↗noamshazeer.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
He co-authored the seminal 2017 Google paper "Attention Is All You Need," introducing the Transformer architecture powering modern large language models. After early work at Google, he co-founded Character.AI, later returned to Google as Gemini co-tech lead, and subsequently joined OpenAI.
3shows
4appearances
68statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
27said about them ↓ Everything Noam Shazeer said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
AI capable of curing cancer is only a few years away
“I'd love to get to the point where you can just ask it how to cure cancer or something, you know. I mean, it's, you know, it seems a few years away for now, but, you know, like.”
Shazeer: Character.ai Rejects Product Managers Who Push for Vertical Specialization
“And like, you know, we talked to like some you know, potential product managers early on and they all say the same thing. Oh yeah. Pick your verticals, narrow it down to me, to make it usable. And like, no, we're not going to hire these people. That's like the…”
Shazeer: Most Core AI Intelligence Will Come From Text Models
“But I think that a lot of the core intelligence is going to come from a From these text models.”
Entertainment is a $2T industry built on imaginary friends
“Entertainment is like this two trillion dollar a year industry. And like the dirty secret is that entertainment Is imaginary friends that don't know you exist.”
LLM hallucination is a feature, not a bug, for AI companions
“Like you want to launch something that's a doctor, It's going to be a lot slower because you want to be really, really, really careful about not providing like false information, but friend, you can do like really fast. Like it's just entertainment. It makes t…”
AI companion entertainment is ready for immediate explosive adoption
“If I, like, I want to push this technology ahead fast, like, that's what I want to go with, because like, A, it's, you know, it's ready for an explosion, like right now, not like in five years when we solve all the problems, but like, now.”
Character.AI aims for AGI by building consumer products at scale
“Our goal is to be like an AGI company and a product first company. And the way to do that is by picking the right product that forces us to work on the right things, things that generalize, make the model smarter, make it, like, do what people, you know, what …”
Frustration over inability to launch AI products drove Google exit
“You know, some people are motivated by publishing, you know, like, I was frustrated I couldn't launch at Google.”
Theory of mind in AI is an emergent property of scale
“Yeah, just make the thing smarter. It's gonna have a better theory of mind, and I think that's definitely something massively, massively important. It seems like one of these emergent properties that just Is gonna, going to come with scale.”
AI will improve massively from scaling without new breakthroughs
“And without any breakthroughs, like it's going to get like massively better as everyone just Kind of scales up to use it, and there will be more breakthroughs because now, you know, like all the scientists in the world are like working on like making this stuf…”
AI scaling laws show no signs of stopping
“I don't think anyone's seen like these scaling laws, you know, stop. I think as far as anybody has experimented, stuff just gets, keeps, keeps getting smarter.”
Noam Shazeer: Compute and Model Size Constrain AI Progress More Than Data
“Yeah, probably the size of the model is the bigger challenge. We can get a lot of data, but actually the number one thing that's important is how much computation you do to train it.”
Shazeer: Users Prefer Video Game Characters Over AI Psychologists for Therapy
“We put up as an example, like a psychologist character, like maybe, maybe you want to, you know, talk to something and feel better, you know, and you know, that gets a little bit of use, but then what we hear a lot more from users is like, I'm talking to a vid…”
Shazeer: Total Computation Is the Single Most Critical Factor in AI Training
“We can get a lot of, we can get a lot of data, but like, really, actually the number one thing that's important is how much computation you do to train it.”
Shazeer: AI Hardware Advances Will Enable Garage Developers to Match Big Tech
“The hardware is progressing so fast that what you could do at a big company, you know, one year, a few years later, you're going to be able to do You know, at the university lab or in your garage.”
Shazeer: Character.ai Views AI Model Hallucinations as a Feature, Not a Bug
“We consider them a feature or at least, okay, basically, our goal, you know, our strategy is, like, launch something general, let people do what they want with it, and if these models are hallucinating, which we, which they certainly are, and we advertise that…”
Shazeer: AI Research Is Currently Like Alchemy With Unknown Outcomes
“And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that, you know, this field is kind of alchemy. Right now, like no one knows exactly what is going to work.”
Shazeer Calls Next-Token Prediction an AI-Complete Problem
“And like, the problem is super simple to define. It's just like predict the next word, the fat cat sat on the, you know, like, okay, well, you know, what comes next? Like it's extremely easy to define. And if you can do a great job of it, like, you know, then …”
Core AI Intelligence Will Primarily Emerge From Text Models
“But I think that a lot of the core intelligence is going to come from these text models.”
AI Scaling Has Not Hit a Wall and Will Keep Improving
“So, and at the same time, like, I don't think anyone's seen a wall in terms of how good this stuff is. So I think it will just, it's just gonna keep getting better. I don't know what stops it.”
AI Models Can Generate Synthetic Data to Avoid Looming Shortages
“I think I'm not that worried about Coming up with data and I feel like we could probably like just generate some more with the AI.”
AI Assistants With a Single Neutral Corporate Persona End Up Boring
“Like if you're like such a public, you know, trying to present like one public persona that everyone likes, you're going to end up just being boring essentially. And people just don't want boring. You know, people want like the, you know want to interact with …”
Shazeer is not currently afraid of AGI destroying humanity
“No. Not yet. Not yet. I think there's a lot of possibility of you know, a lot of potential benefits and yeah, we're going to work on it as the technology improves.”
The other half of the tape: Noam Shazeer's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 25 times in 15 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sarah Guo 5Harry Stebbings 5David George 4Alex Rampell 3Mustafa Suleyman 2Elad Gil 2Marc Andreessen 1Jakob Uszkoreit 1
Statements about Noam Shazeer, by other people (2)
a16z paid growth prices for early-stage Character.AI to back Noam Shazeer
“My partner, Sarah led around a character AI and, you know, it was extremely early stage and, You know, we invested at a, you know, what you would call a gross stage price. But we knew that the likelihood of some degree of success in backing Nome was extremely …”
Suleyman and others aggressively pushed Google to launch LLMs in 2021
“While I was there, sort of in the last year in twenty-twenty-one, I tried pretty hard to get things launched at Google. We were all kind of banging on the table, being like, come on, this is the future, and you know obviously David Luan from Adept was also in …”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 13
No Priors 8
the a16z Podcast 4
2026 8 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- DeepSeek Raises at $50B | The Rise of Open Source vs OpenAI & Anthropic | OpenAI Builds Own Chip · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The AI Code Slop: Risk or Opportunity?
- Alex Rampell: The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers & Labour | The Future of Venture · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The AI Opportunity that goes beyond Models
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2023 10 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- Sarah Guo: On Her New $101M Fund; How AI Impacts Inequality; AI Startups vs Incumbents | E1007 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Christian Kleinerman: Do OpenAI and Anthropic Have a Sustaining Moat? Who Wins the AI Wars? | E1063 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- No Priors Ep. 16 | With Mustafa Suleyman, Founder of DeepMind and Inflection
- No Priors Ep. 45 | With Reid Hoffman
- No Priors Ep. 32 | With NEAR’s Illia Polosukhin
- No Priors Ep. 29 | With Inceptive CEO Jakob Uszkoreit
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Noam's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | AI Scientist, OpenAI | 2 | 26 | 100% 1/1 | full record on 20VC → |
| NO PRIORSLEDGER | AI Scientist, OpenAI | 1 +1 | 26 | 100% 1/1 | full record on No Priors → |
| a16zLEDGER | AI Scientist, OpenAI | 1 | 16 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |