Google has reportedly paid approximately $2.7 Billion to rehire Noam Shazeer, who left the company back in 2021. The main reason for his quitting was because the company refused to release a chatbot that was created by him.
Shazeer was one of the first 100 employees, back in 2000, who Google hired. Reportedly, after spending such a long time with the company, he requested the tech giant to release the bot that he developed with his colleague, Daniel De Freitas.
Upon denying his request, both of them quit and co-founded the start-up Character.AI. Which grew to become one of the hottest AI startups in Silicon Valley and eventually reached a $1 billion valuation. Google said it paid Character around $2.7 billion to license the company’s technology in August. At the time of the deal, Character.AI claimed to have over 20 million monthly active users.
But according to the speculation, the main deal was Google wanted Shazeer back. This was confirmed when last month, Google and Character.AI announced that Shazeer, Freitas, and some Character members of AI research team would join Google’s AI unit DeepMind.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, was fascinated with Shazeer and believed he could construct an AI model capable of operating at human-level intelligence.
“If there’s anybody I can think of in the world who’s likely to do it, it’s going to be him,” Schmidt was noted as saying of Shazeer during a conversation with Stanford University in 2015.
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