Google has rehired longtime researcher Noam Shazeer to co-lead the company’s AI models in a $2.7 billion deal, The Wall Street Journal reported. Shazier left Google in 2021 after 21 years at Google.
He reportedly left after the company refused to implement a chatbot he and a colleague had developed. He continued to be the character’s leader. love.
He is a co-author of the seminal 2017 research paper that fueled the current AI boom. Character.AI leverages the technological advances pioneered in this paper. The company has raised $193 million and was valued at $1 billion by venture capitalists last year.
Character.AI reached a valuation of $1 billion last year. According to the report, Google paid Character.AI $2.7 billion to transfer the technology and bring Shazeer back to Google.
The AI boom is prompting startups to release new features for chatbots as competitors such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Google, and Amazon-backed Anthropic look to gain market share by acquiring new users. It became.
Last year, Google was in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI, but chose to bring him back.
The partnership is similar to similar moves by Amazon and Microsoft to acquire top talent from AI startups, and comes at a time when Big Tech companies are facing regulatory scrutiny.
Shazeer, along with other co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, is the technical lead for Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot. Gemini is a series of AI models being developed by Google’s AI division, DeepMind, and integrated into products such as Search and Pixel smartphones.