Why Google paid $2.7 billion to rehire 48-year-old AI genius Noam Shazeer

Google had to pay $2.7 billion to rehire artificial intelligence genius Noam Shazeer who left the tech giant to found his own startup. The 48-year-old software engineer was hired by Google in 2000 and he left the company in 2021 after it refused his request to release a chat bot that he had developed with a colleague Daniel De Freitas, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas went on to found Character.AI which became one of the hottest AI startups in Silicon Valley and reached a $1 billion valuation last year. After this, Google announced that both of them are joining Google’s AI unit DeepMind and the Sundar Pichai company paid Character.AI $2.7 billion to license its technology as well as to get Noam Shazeer to work for the company, The Wall Street Journal said in its report.
The licensing deal allows Google to immediately access Character.AI’s intellectual property without having to wait for the regulatory approval. The report added that Noam Shazeer’s return to Google is being viewed among s the primary reason behind the acquisition of Character.AI by the company’s employees.
Even former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was reportedly impressed with Noam Shazeer which resulted in the latter being able to build an AI model that could operate with 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,” Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying of Noam Shazeer in 2015. In 2017, Noam Shazeer also created Meena, a chat bot that could engage humans on a range of issues. At the time, he was so confident of Meena’s utility that he predicted it would one day replace Google’s search engine. But Google bosses thought that it was too risky to release Meena due to concerns about safety and fairness, the Journal reported.
Noam Shazeer will now lead the company’s efforts to build the next version of Gemini, Google’s next-generation AI model built to compete with rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.