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Google Hires Ex-Character AI Founder to Co-Lead AI Model Development
Google has named Noam Shazeer, co-founder of Character.AI, a technical lead for its Gemini AI project. This marks his return to the company after paying billions to secure his expertise.
Google has named Noam Shazeer, a former researcher at Google and founder of the startup Character.AI, as co-leader of its main AI project. The company told staff in a memo that Shazeer will be a technical lead on Gemini, along with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals.
DeepMind, Google’s AI division, is making a line of AI models called Gemini. Products such as the Search and Pixel smartphones utilize these models. Shazeer recently returned to Google after starting a chatbot company in 2021. The U.S. tech giant paid billions to hire him and a few other employees, then made a deal with Character to license his work. AI.
“We are thrilled to join the best team on earth and build the most valuable technology on earth,” Shazeer wrote in an email response to the memo that Reuters saw. The memo included the information for the first time.
Shazeer joined Google in 2000, two years after it started. In 2017, he co-wrote a groundbreaking research paper that started the current AI boom. Kindness. The paper first introduced the new technologies used by AI. Investors thought it was worth $1 billion a year ago, but it has now raised $193 million.
Google Reconsiders AI Investment
There were rumors that Google would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in character development. Reuters said in November that they would use AI, but they changed their minds and brought back Shazeer. The deal is similar to what Amazon and Microsoft have done in the past to hire top talent from AI startups. It comes at a time when regulators are closely watching big tech companies.
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating the other two deals, even though they are not acquisitions. A U.S. judge said this month that Google’s search engine broke antitrust law by spending billions of dollars to make an illegal monopoly.
