Editor-DN
Google has rehired longtime researcher Noam Shazier to co-lead its AI models in a $2.7 billion deal, the Wall Street Journal reports. Mr Shazier left Google in 2021 after being part of the company for 21 years.
He reportedly quit when the company refused to launch a chatbot he had built with a colleague. He went to head the character. A.I
He was a co-author of a seminal 2017 research paper that triggered the current AI boom. Character.AI uses the technological advances presented in the paper. It has raised $193 million and was valued at $1 billion by venture capitalists last year.
Character.AI reached a $1 billion valuation last year. Google paid Character.AI $2.7 billion to transfer the technology and bring Mr. Shazier back to Google. The report said.
The AI-boom has spurred startups to release new features in their chatbots as rivals like Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Google and Amazon-backed Anthropic look to gain market share by adding new users. .
Last year, Google was in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI, but chose to pull back.
The deal, which parallels efforts by Amazon and Microsoft to poach top talent from AI startups, comes at a time when big tech companies are facing regulatory scrutiny.
Shazier Gemini — serving as a technical lead on Google’s AI chatbot — joins other co-leaders Jeff Dean and Auriol Vinales. Gemini is a line of AI models developed by DeepMind, Google’s AI division, that are being integrated into products like Search and Pixel smartphones.
