Noam Shazeer back at Google in $ 2.7-billion deal: Who he is, what his rehiring says about AI sector

Who is Noam Shazeer, and why does his rehiring last month deserve attention?

Quitting Google

Shazeer, 48, joined Google in 2000, and quit 21 years later when the company refused to launch a chatbot he had built along with a colleague (Daniel De Freitas, also re-hired in the current deal).

During his time at the tech giant, Shazeer in 2017 co-authored a research paper titled ‘Attention is All You Need’. This paper first proposed the system that is the bedrock of the generative AI tools popular today, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s very own Gemini. Earlier, his work to improve the spelling corrector of Google’s search engine had received attention.

In 2020, Shazeer and De Freitas unveiled Meena, a chatbot that could hold ‘conversations’ on a variety of topics. However, Google refused to go public with it, over concerns the chatbot would say something it shouldn’t.

In 2023, Shazeer said on a podcast called ‘No Priors’, “I think it was just a matter of large companies having concerns about launching projects that can say anything, how much you’re risking versus how much you have to gain from it.”

Launching Character.ai

Shazeer and De Freitas then quit, and in 2021 launched Character.ai, a chatbot service which allowed users to create and chat with AI models of celebrities, fictional characters, service providers like language instructors, tour guides, etc. The company raised $ 43 million in seed funding.

“It’s going to be super, super helpful to a lot of people who are lonely or depressed,” Shazeer had said on “The Aarthi and Sriram Show” podcast in 2023, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In October 2022, The Washington Post reported that Character.ai had “logged hundreds of thousands of user interactions in its first three weeks of beta-testing”. Its mobile app was launched in May 2023, seeing over 1.7 million downloads in the first week.

However, soon, it began to struggle. The cost of developing its technology was difficult to support using the revenue it was generating. Also, many users wanted characters for romantic conversations, which was not the direction the firm wanted to go in.

Return to Google, ‘reverse acqui-hire’ concerns

Now, Google has paid $2.7 billion to license Character.ai’s technology, and also to get Shazeer, De Freitas, and other senior staff to work for it. The deal was struck last month. According to Reuters, Shazeer serves as technical lead on Gemini, Google’s main AI project, along with the other leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals.

The acqui-hiring route allows big companies to escape regulatory scrutiny and not be pulled up for antitrust violations, which a full merger would entail. Antitrust rules exist to stop major players from establishing a monopoly by buying out competitors. The existence of small, independent firms is considered especially crucial in nascent fields like AI, to promote innovation and advancement of technology.

Since Google has not outright bought Character.ai, it has not come up against the regulations wall. This deal is similar to what Microsoft signed with Inflection AI in March, for $ 650 million, and Amazon with Covariant in August.