Google has reportedly paid $2.7 billion to rehire an artificial intelligence genius who left the company in an angry rage three years ago to found his own startup.
Noam Chazeel, a 48-year-old software engineer who was hired by Google in 2000 as one of its first few hundred employees, left the company in 2021 after the company rejected his request to release a chatbot he developed with colleague Daniel de Freitas.
Shazia and de Freitas went on to found Character.AI, which has grown into one of Silicon Valley’s hottest AI startups, eventually reaching a valuation of $1 billion last year.
Noam Chazier agreed to return to Google after the company paid $2.7 billion to license technology from his startup, Character.AI. The Washington Post via Getty Images
Last month, Google and Character.AI announced that Shazeer, De Freitas, and several members of the Character.AI research team would join Google’s AI division, DeepMind.
At the time of the deal, Character.AI announced it had more than 20 million monthly active users.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Google paid Character.AI $2.7 billion to license its technology and to get Shazier and his team to agree to work for the company.
While the licensing agreement does not amount to a full acquisition, it represents a unique arrangement that gives Google immediate access to Character.AI’s intellectual property without having to wait for regulatory and bureaucratic approvals that would be required if it were to acquire the company outright.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Shazia’s return to Google is widely seen among Googlers as a key reason for the acquisition of Character.AI.
According to the Wall Street Journal, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was impressed with Schmidt and believed he could build AI models that operated with human-level intelligence.
“If you can think of anyone in the world who could do that, it’s him,” Schmidt reportedly said of Shazia during a talk at Stanford University in 2015.
Shazia and Daniel de Freitas left the company in 2021 after Google refused to release a chatbot they co-developed. The Washington Post via Getty Images
In 2017, Shazia and his Google colleague de Freitas teamed up to build Meena, a chatbot that can converse with humans on a range of issues.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Shazeer was so confident in Meena’s usefulness that he predicted it would one day replace Google’s search engine.
But Google executives thought releasing Meena was too risky, citing safety and fairness concerns, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Google named Shazeer, who made hundreds of millions of dollars from the deal, as one of three people to lead the company’s efforts to build the next version of Gemini, Google’s next-generation AI model built to take on rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Earlier this year, Google temporarily suspended Gemini’s image-generating feature for generating inaccurate “woke” depictions, including of minority Founding Fathers and a diverse Pope.
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Last month, Google lifted the suspension after fixing the bug, allowing users to create images using the prompts.
The high price Google paid to bring Shazia and de Freitas back onto the team shows how Silicon Valley tech giants are competing at great expense to hire the best talent in the age of AI, especially in the wake of OpenAI’s rollout of ChatGPT.
The competition for talent has intensified to the point that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have personally written letters to new employees urging them to join the company.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Brin was reportedly a key figure in persuading Shazia to return to Google.
Companies like OpenAI are paying their best recruits compensation packages of $5 million to $10 million, most of which is paid in the form of stock.
According to data uncovered by tech-centric news site The Information, Mehta has a reputation for being a bit stingy, offering compensation packages in the range of $1 million to $2 million.
