Google pays $2.7 billion to bring back AI visionary Noam Shazeer

Google has paid a hefty sum of $2.7 billion to bring back Noam Shazeer, a renowned artificial intelligence (AI) expert who previously worked at the tech giant but left after a disagreement.
Shazeer, who co-developed a chatbot that Google chose not to release, left the company in 2021 to launch his own AI startup. Now, he’s back at Google after a significant licencing deal with Character.AI, the company he co-founded, as per a report from WSJ.
Noam Shazeer, 48, was one of Google’s early hires, joining the company in 2000. A talented software engineer, Shazeer made his mark in AI, becoming a key figure in Google’s early AI development.
He left the company in 2021 following a dispute over Meena, a chatbot he built alongside Daniel De Freitas, another AI researcher at Google.
Shazeer and De Freitas believed in the potential of Meena, a chatbot designed to engage humans in various conversations. Shazeer was confident that Meena could even replace Google’s search engine in the future, but Google’s leadership was cautious, raising concerns about safety and fairness in AI deployment. This disagreement ultimately led Shazeer to leave Google and set up his own company, Character.AI, with De Freitas.
After leaving Google, Shazeer co-founded Character.AI, an AI startup focused on developing chatbots and AI that can mimic human conversations.
Within just a few years, Character.AI became one of Silicon Valley’s most promising AI startups, achieving a valuation of $1 billion.
By 2022, it was seen as a top AI player, largely due to Shazeer’s deep expertise in building advanced AI models.
In a surprising twist, just last month, Google announced a major deal with Character.AI. As part of a $2.7 billion licencing agreement, Google secured access to Character.AI’s technology, but there was an additional key part to the deal: Noam Shazeer would return to Google. The payment was not only for licencing the startup’s technology but also to bring back Shazeer, whose expertise was seen as crucial for Google’s future AI projects.
Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, along with certain members of the Character.AI research team, joined Google’s AI division, DeepMind. With this acquisition, Google gained valuable intellectual property without needing regulatory approval, a significant advantage for the company as it continues to compete in the AI space.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once praised Noam Shazeer’s ability to push AI development forward. Schmidt, who worked closely with Shazeer during his time at Google, saw him as one of the few people capable of developing AI with human-level intelligence. “If there’s anyone in the world who can achieve it, it’s him,” Schmidt remarked in 2015.
After his return to Google, Shazeer is now one of the leaders working on Gemini, the next version of Google’s cutting-edge AI technology. Gemini is seen as a critical part of Google’s AI future, and Shazeer’s role in overseeing its development will be crucial.
In addition to his return to Google, Shazeer has made a significant financial gain from the deal. He reportedly made hundreds of millions of dollars from his stake in Character.AI as part of the agreement.