Shazil (left)
In the hot Artificial Intelligence (AI) era, tech companies are going to great lengths to recruit top talent. In this regard.Googlehas left other companies in the dust.
Noam Shazeer joined Google in 2000 as one of the company's first few hundred employees. Shazeer had co-authored a groundbreaking research paper that sparked the AI boom. However, after Google refused to release a chatbot developed by Shazeer, he left Google in 2021 and started his own companyCharacter.ai.However, Character.AI then fell on hard times and Google moved quickly to bring Shazir back to the company.
Google wrote a check for about $2.7 billion (roughly Rs. 18.96 billion) for Character.AI, people familiar with the matter said, with the official reason being to obtain a license for Character.AI's technology, but the deal actually included another part: that Shazir had agreed to go back to work for Google.Within Google, Shazir's return is widely seen as the main reason Google agreed to pay this hefty license fee.
As part of the deal, Shazir profited hundreds of millions of dollars from his stake in Character.AI.The proceeds are quite lucrative for a founder who neither sold the company nor took it public. The 48-year-old engineer is now one of three leaders of Google's AI technology, responsible for developing the next version of Gemini, its most powerful AI chatbot.
The deal has landed Shazir in the middle of a Silicon Valley debate. The debate centers on whether tech giants are overspending in the race to develop cutting-edge AI. Some believe AI will determine the future of computing. "Shazir is clearly the preeminent talent in the field, but is he really 20 times better than everyone else?" Christopher Manning, director of Stanford University's AI lab, said.
As of press time, Google declined to make Shazir available for an interview. Shazir also did not respond to a request for comment