Google Rehires AI Pioneer Noam Shazeer for $2.7 Billion After Bot Dispute: Report
Last Updated on September 26, 2024 by Sagar Sharma
Google has reportedly spent $2.7 billion to rehire Noam Shazeer, a former employee and AI pioneer who left the company three years ago after Google refused to release his chatbot project. Shazeer, who originally joined Google as one of its first few hundred employees in 2000, left in 2021 to co-found the AI startup Character.AI with his colleague Daniel De Freitas.
Character.AI quickly rose to prominence, reaching a $1 billion valuation and gaining over 20 million monthly active users. Last month, Google announced a deal with Character.AI that would bring Shazeer, De Freitas, and members of their research team into Google’s AI unit, DeepMind. The $2.7 billion arrangement allows Google to license Character.AI’s technology and secure Shazeer’s expertise without the delays of a full acquisition.
According to reports, Shazeer’s return to Google was a major factor in the deal. His previous work on an advanced chatbot, Meena, was seen as so groundbreaking that he once predicted it could replace Google’s search engine. However, Google executives hesitated to release Meena due to concerns about safety and fairness.
Shazeer is now one of three key leaders developing Google’s next-generation AI model, Gemini, designed to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Shazeer’s rehiring underscores the intense competition among tech giants to secure top AI talent, particularly in the wake of recent AI advancements.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has long been a strong supporter of Shazeer, once saying, “If there’s anybody in the world likely to build an AI with human-level intelligence, it’s going to be him.”
Shazeer’s return highlights the high stakes in the AI race, with companies like Google, Meta, and others fiercely competing to attract the industry’s best minds.
