Google Pays $2.7 Billion To Rehire AI Researcher

 Photo: Google

India-West News Desk

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Google has brought back its veteran researcher Noam Shazeer in a – wait for it – $2.7 billion agreement to co-lead its AI model development, according to The Wall Street Journal. Shazeer, who spent 21 years at Google, left the company in 2021 after his proposal to launch a chatbot was rejected. He then went on to lead Character.AI, a company known for leveraging innovations from a pivotal 2017 research paper that Shazeer co-authored, which sparked the current AI revolution. Character.AI has since raised $193 million in funding and was valued at $1 billion last year.

The AI boom has driven companies to introduce new chatbot features, as major players like Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Google, and Amazon-supported Anthropic are competing for market share by attracting new users. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google’s deal with Shazeer mirrors similar moves by Amazon and Microsoft, who have been acquiring top talent from AI startups amid intensifying competition and regulatory scrutiny.

Shazeer is now serving as a technical lead on Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, alongside co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals. The Gemini models, being developed by Google’s AI unit DeepMind, are already being integrated into key products like Google Search and Pixel smartphones.