Noam Shazeer

Noam Shazeer (born 1975 or 1976)[1] is an American software engineer and entrepreneur known for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and deep learning, particularly in the development of transformer models and natural language processing. He lives in Palo Alto, California.[2] Shazeer's grandparents emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel, eventually emigrating to the USA.[2] His father, Dov Shazeer, was a math teacher who became an engineer[2] and his mother was a homemaker.[3] Shazeer was born in Philadelphia, attended grade school at Cohen Hillel Academy in Marblehead, Massachusetts,[citation needed] and attended Swampscott High School in Swampscott, Massachusetts.[4] He won a gold medal with perfect score at International Mathematical Olympiad 1994 as a member of the US team.[4][5] He went on to study math and computer science at Duke University[2] in Durham, North Carolina from 1994 to 1998.[3] At Duke he was a recipient of the Angier B. Duke Memorial Scholarship,[6] and, as part of the Duke math team, won prizes in the Putnam Competition.[2][7][8] He started studying in a graduate program in Berkeley but soon left to be one of Google's first employees.[2] Shazeer is an orthodox Jew.[2][3][9] His sister was ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew College.[2] He is a father of three and is married to Yael Shacham Shazeer.[2]