Noam Shazeer rejoined Google from the Character.AI (chatbot) as the tech giant spent $2.7 billion with a licensing deal bringing him back (Image: X @Noam Shazeer)
Tech giant Google has appointed Noam Shazeer, the ex-head of startup Character. AI to lead the company’s main AI project along with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals. Noam Shazeer will serve as a technical head on Gemini and has already contributed to Google being a long-time researcher.
He has been a key figure in the AI field since joining the platform Google in 2000 and served as a major contributor to Google’s LaMDA dialogue system, Noam Shazeer rejoined Google from the Character.AI (chatbot) as the tech giant spent $2.7 billion with a licensing deal bringing him back.
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Character.AI was founded in November 2021 by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, both of whom were engineers at Google. During their time at Google, Shazeer was a lead author on a paper that has been widely cited as key to today’s chatbots, while De Freitas was the lead designer of an experimental AI initially called Meena, which later became known as LaMDA.
Later, he invented much of the current revolution in large language models including Transformer, personally designing the multi-head attention, and the residual architecture, and coded up the first better-than-SOTA working implementation.
In 2017, Shazeer, while at Google, co-authored a research paper titled “Attention Is All You Need,” which was presented at a top AI and machine-learning conference. The paper proposed the transformer, a network architecture that serves as the basis for the current wave of generative AI tools like ChatGPT. In other words, it laid the foundation for the current AI revolution. By starting his venture, Character.AI, Shazeer aimed to create a platform to make this technology accessible to everyone. He has been recognized as one of the most influential people in AI, making it to the AI 2023 list.
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