Google Is Paying $2.7 Billion to Reportedly Rehire an Early Employee Who Built an AI Chatbot Before ChatGPT
The 48-year-old engineer reportedly made hundreds of millions of dollars through the deal.
Key Takeaways
- According to a Wednesday Wall Street Journal report, the main reason Google entered a $2.7 billion agreement with an AI chatbot startup was to rehire Noam Shazeer.
- Shazeer was a former Google employee who quit in 2021 after creating an AI chatbot the company refused to take public.
- Other big tech companies have made similar agreements recently.
In August, Google entered a $2.7 billion agreement with . The official reason? Getting a license to use Character’s technology.
The unofficial reason? According to a , the consensus within Google is that the tech giant primarily wanted to rehire a former employee who quit in 2021 after 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 “” which introduced a new deep learning architecture. That paper has been cited by other researchers and established him as one of the.
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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.”
In 2021, before the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Shazeer . 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 in funding at a as of March.
Google’s August agreement with Character brought Shazeer back into the company as part of the , which works on AI.
Shazeer made hundreds of millions of dollars as part of the deal, according to the WSJ.
Other big tech companies have made similar agreements recently. In late August, to non-exclusively license AI models developed by AI robotics startup and bring over Covariant’s co-founders and some employees.
Key Takeaways
- According to a Wednesday Wall Street Journal report, the main reason Google entered a $2.7 billion agreement with an AI chatbot startup was to rehire Noam Shazeer.
- Shazeer was a former Google employee who quit in 2021 after creating an AI chatbot the company refused to take public.
- Other big tech companies have made similar agreements recently.
In August, Google entered a $2.7 billion agreement with . The official reason? Getting a license to use Character’s technology.
The unofficial reason? According to a , the consensus within Google is that the tech giant primarily wanted to rehire a former employee who quit in 2021 after 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 “” which introduced a new deep learning architecture. That paper has been cited by other researchers and established him as one of the.
