Google paid $2.7 billion for licenses for the technologies of the AI startup Character AI, which was created in 2021 by former employee of the IT giant Noam Shazeer. According to the source, Google’s main goal was to return to the company the IT genius who became famous for his research in the field of artificial intelligence. Shazir is currently a vice president at Google and works on developing the company’s AI algorithms, such as Gemini.
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The report says that it was for the sake of Shazir’s return that Google agreed to pay a huge license fee. According to a knowledgeable source, Shazir earned hundreds of millions of dollars from his stake in the startup Character AI. It is noted that the amount paid by Google is unusually large for a founder who did not sell his company and did not take it public.
Noam Shazir has worked at Google since 2000. In 2017, he and a group of other authors published a paper called “Attention is all you need,” which became the basis for generative neural network technology. Later, he and his colleagues created the chatbot Meena and predicted that in the near future the chatbot could replace the Google search engine and bring in trillions of dollars in revenue. Google refused to publicly launch the chatbot, and Shazir left the company in 2021, accusing it of bureaucratic red tape when integrating technology into user products.
He later created the startup Character AI, which two years later attracted $150 million in investments and was valued at 1 billion. Amid competition from OpenAI and Microsoft, Shazir tried to attract more funds for his startup and ultimately managed to come to an agreement with Alphabet, the parent company of Google. As a result of the deal, Shazir and several dozen other Character AI employees moved to Google.