The week that asked who controls AI ends by zooming all the way in — to the individual. On June 17, Noam Shazeer, co-author of the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer (the architecture under ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude) and co-lead of Google's Gemini, announced he is leaving Google for OpenAI — less than two years after Google paid a reported $2.7 billion to bring him back from Character.AI. Peers call it the most significant AI talent move of the year, and the lesson for leaders is sharp: in a field where the scarcest input is talent, retention of your two or three irreplaceable people is a board-level risk, not an HR matter.

The AI-jobs story also flipped twice. New Gallup research finds US tech workers who use AI less than monthly are about three times more likely to have been laid off than at-least-monthly users (~18% vs 6%), ev ...