Noam Shazeer back at Google in $ 2.7-billion deal: Who he is, what his rehiring says about AI sector
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Who is Noam Shazeer?
Shazeer, a 48-year-old software engineer and one of Google's early hires in 2000 left the company in 2021 when Google declined to release the chatbot he built with colleague Daniel De Freitas. Together, they founded Character.AI, which became a top AI startup in Silicon Valley, hitting a $1 billion valuation last year.He co-invented the transformer architecture, which is the backbone of modern AI language models like OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s BERT.
The $2.7 Billion Deal: What’s Happening?
Google recently brought Shazeer back in a $2.7 billion deal, underscoring the growing importance of AI talent in today’s tech ecosystem. This is considered the largest deal in AI.
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Character.ai
Shazeer and De Freitas then quit, and in 2021 launched Character.ai, a chatbot service which allowed users to create and chat with AI models of celebrities, fictional characters, service providers like language instructors, tour guides, etc. The company raised $ 43 million in seed funding.“It’s going to be super, super helpful to a lot of people who are lonely or depressed,” Shazeer had said on “The Aarthi and Sriram Show” podcast in 2023, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Reverse acqui-hire
Google has paid $2.7 billion to licence Character.ai’s technology, and also to get Shazeer, De Freitas, and other senior staff to work for it. The deal was struck last month. According to Reuters, Shazeer serves as technical lead on Gemini, Google’s main AI project, along with the other leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals.The existence of small, independent firms is considered especially crucial in nascent fields like AI, to promote innovation and advancement of technology.
Conclusion
In October 2022, The Washington Post reported that Character.ai had “logged hundreds of thousands of user interactions in its first three weeks of beta-testing”. Its mobile app was launched in May 2023, seeing over 1.7 million downloads in the first week.His return signals a new phase of AI development at Google, and the deal underscores the industry's race to secure top AI talent. Shazeer's expertise could further propel Google's advancements in AI.
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