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In August, Google signed a $2.7 billion deal with AI chatbot startup Character.AI. The official reason? The acquisition of a license to use Character technology.
The unofficial reason? According to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, the consensus at Google is that the tech giant primarily wanted to rehire a former employee who quit in 2021 after developing an AI chatbot that Google did not want to make public.
The engineer, 48-year-old Noam Shazeer, was one of the first hundred employees at Google. He quickly established himself as an AI expert and in 2017, with seven other Google employees, wrote a paper entitled “Attention is All You Need,” in which he proposed a new deep learning architecture. This paper was cited more than 100,000 times by other researchers, making him one of the inventors of modern AI.
Related: Google unveils its new AI assistant Project Astra at the I/O event – Here's what else you missed
Shazeer takes credit for his contributions: His About section on LinkedIn states at the time of writing: “I invented a large part of the current revolution in large language models.”
Noam Shazeer. Photo credit: Winni Wintermeyer for The Washington Post via Getty Images
In 2021, before the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Shazeer worked on AI at Google. He and his colleagues developed an AI chatbot that could interact with users in conversations, and they lobbied for Google to show it to the public. Google refused multiple times, and Shazeer quit to start Character. He built the startup from 2021 to today with over $150 million in funding, which was valued at $1 billion in March.
Through the agreement between Google and Character reached in August, Shazeer returned to the company as part of the DeepMind research team working on artificial intelligence.
According to the WSJ, Shazeer earned hundreds of millions of dollars as part of the deal.
Related: Google co-founder Sergey Brin is back at the company “pretty much every day.” Here's what he's working on.
Other major technology companies have recently made similar agreements. In late August, Amazon signed a deal to non-exclusively license AI models developed by AI robotics startup Covariant, and acquired Covariant's co-founders and some employees.
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