In August, Google struck a $2.7 billion deal with AI chatbot startup Character.AI. A legitimate reason? Obtaining a license to use Character technology.
An illegal reason? According to a Wednesday report by the Wall Street Journal, 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 make public.
The engineer, Noam Shazeer, 48, 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 Googlers called “Attention Is All You Need” that 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 founders of modern AI.
Related: Google Unveils Its New Astra AI Assistant Project At I/O Event – Here’s What You Missed
Shazeer claims credit for his contributions: His LinkedIn “About” section at the time of writing reads, “I’ve created many of the current revolutions in major language models.”
Noam Shazeer. Credit: Winni Wintermeyer of 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 through conversation, and they encouraged Google to show it to the public. Google refused many times and Shazeer stopped starting Character, building the startup from 2021 to date with more than 150 million dollars in funding at a cost of $ 1 billion as of March.
Google’s August deal with Character brought Shazeer back to the company as part of DeepMind’s AI research team.
Shazeer made hundreds of millions of dollars as part of the deal, according to the WSJ.
Related: Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Returns to Company ‘Pretty much Every Day.’ Here’s What He’s Working On.
Other major tech companies have made similar deals recently. In late August, Amazon signed an agreement to exclusively license non-license AI models developed by AI robotics startup Covariant and bring in Covariant’s founders and other employees.
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