Google spends $3 billion to invite back "AI genius"

Noam Shazeer continues to work at Google

At a time when tech companies are spending huge sums of money to hire the best minds in artificial intelligence, Google's deal to rehire Noam Shazeer has caught many of its rivals by surprise.

Co-author of a key research paper that fueled the AI ​​boom, Shazeer left Google in 2021 to start his own company after the search giant refused to release a chatbot he developed.

Unexpected reunion

After leaving Google, Noam Shazeer founded Character.AI, an artificial intelligence startup. However, things did not go smoothly when the company's business encountered many difficulties.

Google has acquired Character.AI for about $2.5 billion, according to people familiar with the deal.2.7 billion USD. The official reason for the payment was to license Character's technology. However, the deal also included another important element: Shazeer agreed to work for Google again.

At Google, Shazeeer's return is seen as a key reason the company agreed to pay the investment.2.7 billion USDBut the deal also thrust Shazeeer into a controversy in Silicon Valley.

Noam Shazeer (left) teamed up with Daniel De Freitas to build a chatbot called Meena

Among them, tech giants are questioning overspending in the race to develop AI.

“Noam is clearly a great AI guy. But is he 20 times better than everyone else?” said Christopher Manning, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

It’s a notable turn of events after Shazeer publicly declared that the search giant was taking too much risk when it comes to AI. The 48-year-old engineer is now one of three people leading Google’s effort to build the next version of the Gemini tool.

Shazeer also made hundreds of millions of dollars from his stake in Character.AI as part of the Google acquisition, an unusually large payout for a founder who had no plans to sell the company or take it public.

Pioneer in AI

In 2017, Shazeer published a paper with seven other Google researchers called “Attention is All You Need.” In it, the team detailed a computer system that could predict the next word in a sequence when prompted by a human. It became the foundation of subsequent AI technology.

Shazeer teamed up with Daniel De Freitas, a fellow Googler, to build a chatbot called Meena. In a public memo, Shazeer predicted that it could replace Google's search engine and generate trillions of dollars in revenue.

However, Google's senior managers refused to release the chatbot to the public, citing safety and security concerns.

Google focuses on developing Gemini to compete with ChatGPT

Just a year later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, demonstrating the public demand for AI-powered chatbots. In March 2023, Character.AI raised150 million USDin one investment round and is valued at1 billion USD.

Like other AI startups trying to compete with giants like OpenAI and Microsoft, Character.AI also struggled to cover the high costs of developing its technology before it had a decent enough revenue stream.

For its part, Google is not the first tech giant to acquire a small company in search of talent. Microsoft and Amazon have also made similar deals this year.

Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder who played a key role in the deal to bring Shazeer back, said at a recent conference that the company has been too cautious in deploying artificial intelligence applications. Now, Google is rushing to develop and launch AI technologies as quickly as possible.