Noam Shazeer, a longtime Google researcher and the former CEO of startup Character.AI, has been named by Google to co-lead its primary AI project.
The firm announced in a note to staff that Shazeer will join co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals as a technical lead on Gemini.
DeepMind, Google’s AI section, is developing a range of AI models called Gemini, which are included in products like Pixel smartphones and Search.
After leaving the chatbot startup he started in 2021, Shazeer recently joined Google again. The American tech giant paid billions to acquire him and a few other staff members into DeepMind and to get a license from Character.AI.
“We are thrilled to join the best team on earth building the most valuable technology on earth,” Shazeer wrote in an email reply to the memo, which was seen by Reuters.
The memo was first reported by The Information.
Shazeer began working at Google in 2000, two years after the company was founded. He co-wrote a groundbreaking research article in 2017 that helped spark the current AI boom.
Character.AI makes use of the technological innovations introduced in the study. It raised $193 million, and venture investors valued it at $1 billion the previous year.
Google was in negotiations to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI, as previously reported in November, but opted to reinstate Shazeer instead.
The transaction comes at a time when the big tech companies are under regulatory scrutiny. It is reminiscent of similar maneuvers made by Amazon and Microsoft to snag key people from AI startups.
The other two agreements are under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission even though they are not acquisitions.
According to a ruling made this month by a U.S. judge, Google’s search engine broke antitrust laws by investing billions of dollars to establish an unlicensed monopoly.
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