Who is the AI ​​genius recruited by Google for nearly 3 billion USD?

Google had to pay up to $2.7 billion to hire artificial intelligence genius Noam Shazeer, who left this technology giant to found his own startup. The 48-year-old software engineer was hired by Google in 2000, and he left the company in 2021 after the company rejected his request to release a chat bot he developed with colleague Daniel De Freitas, The Wall Street Journal reported.

After leaving Google, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas founded Character.AI, one of the hottest AI startups in Silicon Valley and reached a valuation of $1 billion last year. Realizing the potential of this emerging unicorn, Google decided to spend $2.7 billion on Character.AI to acquire the technology, as well as invite both Shazeer and De Freitas to work at the DeepMind department.

Character.AI’s technology licensing agreement gives Google immediate access to Character.AI’s intellectual property without having to wait for regulatory approval. Other employees at Google claim that the main reason the company bought Character.AI’s technology was to bring back Noam Shazeer.

Even former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was said to be very impressed with Noam Shazeer and facilitated Shazeer’s development of an AI model capable of operating with human-level intelligence.

“ If there is anyone in the world who is capable of success, it will be him “, Eric Schmidt commented about Noam Shazeer in 2015. In 2017, Noam Shazeer also created Meena, a chatbot that can interact with humans on many different issues. At that time, he was so confident that Meena would be so useful that he predicted that it would replace Google’s search engine in the future.

However, as reported by WSJ Google leaders believe that releasing Meena is too risky due to concerns about safety and fair competition.

Due to the unreleased Meena, Shazeer and De Freitas quit their jobs and in 2021 launched Character.AI, a chatbot service that allows users to create and chat with AI models of celebrities, fictional characters, language teachers, tour guides… The company raised $43 million in seed funding.

Shazeer said: It would be extremely, extremely helpful to a lot of lonely people “. In October 2022, The Washington Post reported that Character.AI had “recorded hundreds of thousands of user interactions in the first three weeks of beta testing”. Its mobile app was launched in May 2023, achieving more than 1.7 million downloads in the first week.

Acquisitions allow large companies to avoid scrutiny from regulators and not face charges of violating antitrust laws in the event of a full-blown merger. In particular, in emerging fields such as AI, the existence of small and independent companies is considered crucial to driving innovation and technological development.

Noam Shazeer will now lead the build of the next version of Gemini, the advanced AI model Google built to compete with rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.