Janice R. Andrews
In SAN FRANCISCO, As a smart move to improve its AI skills, Google has made Noam Shazeer, co-founder of the AI company Character.AI, a co-lead of its main AI project. Shazeer was a researcher at Google for a long time. He will now be a technical lead on the Gemini AI models, working with respected friends Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals.
Gemini is a cutting-edge AI project created by Google’s DeepMind division. It is at the cutting edge of AI technology, and Google Search and Pixel smartphones both use its apps. Shazeer’s return to Google is a big reunion, as the tech giant is said to have spent billions to bring him and a small group of Character.AI workers back to work for them.
“We are thrilled to join the best team on earth building the most valuable technology on earth,” Shazeer wrote in response to the internal note. Reuters later got a copy of this email.
Shazeer has made important advances to AI. For example, he co-authored a groundbreaking study paper in 2017 that started the current AI boom. These new ideas have helped his company, Character.AI, get $193 million in funding and a $1 billion value as of last year. Google thought about putting a lot of money into Character.AI at first, but in the end decided to bring Shazeer back to the team.
Tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft have also been hiring top people from AI companies, and Google’s move is similar to what they are doing. These companies are facing more and more attention from regulators. High-profile hires like these show how competitive and strategic the AI world is becoming.
