By MyEngineers
According to Reports, Google reportedly spent $2.7 billion to rehire AI expert Noam Shazeer, who left Google in 2021 after 21 years at the company to start his own startup called Character.AI.
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, with Daniel De Freitas, they founded Character.AI, which became a top AI startup in Silicon Valley, hitting a $1 billion valuation last year. Character.AI allows users to interact with chatbots that roleplay as imaginary characters or well-known figures.
Just last month, Google and Character.AI revealed that Shazeer, De Freitas and certain members of Character.AI’s research team would be joining Google’s AI unit DeepMind. As part pat of the deal, Google reportedly cut a $2.7 billion check to Character. AI.
Official reason for the payment was for licensing Character’s technology, but the agreement also included a key condition: Noam Shazeer would return to work for Google. The licensing deal grants Google instant access to Character.AI’s intellectual property, bypassing the need for regulatory approval.
However, Wall Street Journal reports, “Shazeer’s return is widely viewed as the primary reason” as to why the tech giant cut the check.
While Shazeer wasn’t the sole or direct recipient of Google’s $2.7 billion, he raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from his stake in the startup as part of the deal, sources told the WSJ. That’s still a massive paycheck, especially considering Shazeer didn’t sell his company.
Shazeer was a foundational part of Google’s early efforts to develop AI. In 2017 he coauthored a paper which is largely seen as the early dawn of the large language models as we know them today.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was reportedly so impressed with Noam Shazeer that it paved the way for Shazeer to develop an AI model capable of human-level intelligence. “If there’s anyone in the world who can achieve it, it’s him,” Schmidt said of Shazeer in 2015. Two years later, in 2017, Shazeer went on to create Meena, a chatbot capable of engaging humans across a variety of topics.
Shazeer was reportedly so confident in Meena’s potential that he predicted it could eventually replace Google’s search engine. However, Google’s leadership deemed it too risky to release, citing concerns over safety and fairness.
The computer scientist left Google after the company refused to release a chatbot dubbed Meena to the public in 2021, per the WSJ. OpenAI would later release ChatGPT one year later, beating Google to the race for LLM.
As per the report, Noam Shazeer, who once criticised Google for being too cautious with AI development, is now one of three leaders overseeing the creation of the next version of its cutting-edge AI technology, Gemini.
Early Life and Education
Shazeer was born into a heritage of fortitude: grandparents who survived the Nazi Holocaust. Having that history as his base paved the way for him, providing a healthy dose of determination and persistence. His father, once a math teacher before working in the field of engineering, and his mother was dedicated to staying at home with him and his siblings. Raised in an environment that prioritized education and creativity, Shazeer began cultivating his passion for mathematics and computer science at a young age, which he went on to study at Duke University.
Career at Google
Shazeer joined Google in 2000 and played a big role in the company’s technological progress. First, he improved the spelling correction system used in Google Search to give it a better user experience. But it is best known for co-authoring the seminal research out of a paper in 2017 called “Attention Is All You Need,” researching the novel architecture-based transformer model. This was a landmark breakthrough model in the advancement of natural language processing which underpins countless AI models being used today.
In 2020, he teamed up with fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas to build Meena—an conversational AI capable of human-level conversation. Google did not release Meena despite its capacity to change search and conversational AI, claiming that the chatbot might provide inappropriate responses. Shazeer and De Freitas both moved on from Google in 2021 after this decision.
Founding Character.AI
Separately, Shazeer and De Freitas co-founded Character after leaving Google. (Although you would be forgiven for not knowing they existed, since the company’s website only lists AI as a platform allowing users to ‘create [and] interact with an AI character.’) The company went viral and hit unicorn status with a $1B+ valuation within its first year. Character. In the meantime, it became possible for users to interact with many different characters, including their favorite celebrities and fictitious players thanks to AI.
Return to Google
Shazeer reemerged in the news in August 2024 when Google brought him on again as part of a huge $2.7 billion deal for Character rights. AI’s technology. Meant to beef up Google’s artificial intelligence chops with the development of a project referred as Gemini, this strategic play. Having taken a pedestrianized AI landscape to one of competitive pursuit, Shazeer has since become the technical lead on Gemini, and is now working with other leading researchers to move Google beyond tenets & boundaries, in the league where data speaks everything else.
Criticisms and Proposals for Further Research
While he remains a private person, Shazeer will often be working toward his larger goal of developing AI that enables productive and supportive human computer interaction. He sees AI being part of the answer to wider problems in society from loneliness, to mental health. A vision for future-driven AI solutions led him through projects at Google where he focuses on user-centered challenges.
Noam Shazeer Amazing Journey to the Top of AI World from His Birth in Philadelphia The legacy of his work continues to inform the direction of AI research, and his leadership is sure to influence Google and larger tech landscape for years to come. With AI technology still in its nascence, Shazeer is sure to continue making an impact at the forefront of this rapidly developing domain with an unwavering commitment to novelty and meaningful user interactions.