Google has agreed to pay $2.7 billion to hire back Noam Shazeer, an artificial intelligence expert who left to start his own company. According to the Wall Street Journal, Shazeer is a veteran software engineer who joined Google in 2000. He quit in 2021 after the company rejected his proposal to release a chatbot he was working on along with fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas.
After Google, Shazeer and De Freitas founded Character. AI. It rapidly became one of Silicon Valley’s most visible AI startups, reaching unicorn status at a $1 billion valuation last year. And now, in a surprise turn of events, Google revealed that both would return under the umbrella of its AI unit DeepMind as part of a reported $2.7 billion deal licensing Character. AI’s technology and securing Shazeer’s skills for the company.
Terms of the licensing agreement allow Google to access Character.AI’s intellectual property, bypassing regulatory approval immediately. Many consider Shazeer’s return a turning point factor in the acquisition.
According to Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, he is the brightest person who can independently work out an AI model with human-like intelligence. In 2015, Schmidt said, “If there’s anybody I can think of in the world who’s likely to do it, it’s going to be him.”
In 2017, Shazeer introduced Meena, an advanced chatbot designed to discuss anything with a user. He even went so far as boasting that one day, the machine would replace Google’s search engine. However, executives at Google were leery of releasing Meena; they had reservations on safety and equity grounds.
Now, Shazeer will guide Google’s work on the next version of Gemini, the company’s next-generation AI model that should compete with competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
