Google has appointed Noam Shazeer, the former head of Character.AI and a long-time Google researcher, to co-lead its primary AI project. Shazeer will act as a technical lead on Gemini, alongside co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, as announced in a memo to staff. Gemini is the series of AI models developed by DeepMind, Google’s AI division, which are being integrated into products like Search and Pixel smartphones.
Shazeer recently rejoined Google from Character.AI, a chatbot company he founded in 2021. Google reportedly paid billions to bring Shazeer and other key employees from Character.AI into DeepMind and to secure a licensing agreement with the startup. Shazeer expressed enthusiasm in an email response to the memo, saying, “We are thrilled to join the best team on earth building the most valuable technology on earth.”
Shazeer first joined Google in 2000, two years after its founding, and co-authored a pivotal 2017 research paper that significantly influenced the current AI landscape. Character.AI, which leverages the advancements from this paper, raised $193 million and was valued at $1 billion last year.
Although Google had considered investing hundreds of millions in Character.AI, it opted instead to rehire Shazeer. This move mirrors similar strategies by Amazon and Microsoft to recruit top talent from AI startups, amidst ongoing regulatory scrutiny of Big Tech companies. This month, a U.S. judge ruled that Google’s search engine practices violated antitrust laws, noting that the company spent billions to establish an illegal monopoly.
