According to The Wall Street Journal, Google spent $2.7 billion to bring back Noam Shazeer, a well-known researcher in the field of machine learning. Although Google officially paid for the licenses for the Character.AI technology, the deal included a provision that Shazir would return to the company and soon join DeepMind’s research division. In addition, there are rumors that he may become the head of development of the Gemini chatbot.

Noam Shazir joined Google in 2000, and in 2017 he co-authored with other researchers the article Attention Is All You Need, which became one of the core technologies for generative AI. He soon created the Meena chatbot with Google colleague Daniel de Freitas, but Google executives refused to introduce it publicly, citing security concerns. After this event, in 2021, Shazir and de Freitas left the company and founded the startup Character.AI, which allows users to interact with a chatbot in the role of imaginary characters or famous personalities.

As a result, the startup attracted $150 million in investment and was valued at $1 billion, however, against the background of Google’s competition with OpenAI and Microsoft, Shazir managed to agree on an amount of almost $3 billion. Perhaps such an event will be able to influence the development and implementation of ML technologies at Google. However, investors are concerned that spending billions of dollars on expertise may turn out to be a bad idea.

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