In August, Google entered a $2.7 billion agreement with AI chatbot startup Character.AI. The official reason? Getting a license to use Character’s technology.
The unofficial reason? According to a Wednesday Wall Street Journal report, the consensus within Google is that the tech giant primarily wanted to rehire a former employee who quit in 2021 after creating an AI chatbot that Google refused to take 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 wrote a paper in 2017 with seven other Google employees called “Attention is All You Need” which introduced a new deep learning architecture. That paper has been cited by other researchers more than 100,000 times and established him as one of the inventors of modern AI.
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Shazeer claims credit for his contributions: His LinkedIn “About” section at the time of writing reads, “I have invented much of the current revolution in large language models.”
Noam Shazeer. Credit: Winni Wintermeyer for The Washington Post via Getty Images
In 2021, before the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Shazeer was working on AI at Google. He and his colleagues created an AI chatbot that could interact with users conversationally, and they advocated for Google to demo it to the public. Google refused multiple times and Shazeer quit to start Character, building up the startup from 2021 to the present with over $150 million in funding at a valuation of $1 billion as of March.
Google’s August agreement with Character brought Shazeer back into the company as part of the DeepMind research team, which works on AI.
Shazeer made hundreds of millions of dollars as part of the deal, according to the WSJ.
Related: Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Is Back at the Company ‘Pretty Much Every Day.’ Here’s What He’s Working On.
Other big tech companies have made similar agreements recently. In late August, Amazon signed a deal to non-exclusively license AI models developed by AI robotics startup Covariant and bring over Covariant’s co-founders and some employees.