Google appoints former Character.AI head to co-lead its AI models
Google has appointed Noam Shazeer, former head of startup Character.AI and a longtime researcher at Google, to co-lead its flagship AI project.
Shazeer will assume technical leadership of Gemini, along with other co-leads Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, the company said in a memo to employees.
Gemini is the line of AI models developed by DeepMind, Google’s AI division, that are integrated into products such as Search and Pixel smartphones.
Shazeer recently returned to Google, where he founded the chatbot maker in 2021. The US tech giant paid billions to bring him and a handful of other employees to DeepMind and a licensing deal with Character.AI.
“We are proud to join the best team in the world and build the most valuable technology in the world,” Shazeer wrote in an emailed response to the memo, seen by Reuters.
The memo was first published by The Information.
Shazeer joined Google in 2000, two years after its founding. He co-authored a groundbreaking 2017 research paper that fueled the current AI boom.
Character.AI is leveraging the technical advances pioneered in the article. It has raised $193 million (roughly Rs. 1,618 crore) and was valued at $1 billion (roughly Rs. 8,387 crore) by venture capitalists last year.
Google was in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI, Reuters reported in November, but instead decided to bring back Shazeer.
The deal, which follows similar moves by Amazon and Microsoft to recruit top talent from AI startups, comes as big tech companies face scrutiny from regulators.
Although not acquisitions, the other two deals are under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.
This month, a US judge ruled that Google’s search engine violated antitrust law by investing billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
