A software engineer who left Google after his AI chatbot project was rejected, founded the successful startup Character.AI, which was later acquired by Google for $2.7 billion, which led to the developer returning to the company.
The return of the developer
History of leaving Google
Three years ago, a talented programmer proposed an artificial intelligence project to Google to create a chatbot. However, the idea was rejected, which prompted the specialist to leave the corporation and found his own company.
Noam Shazir, who joined Google in 2000 as one of the first hundred employees, left the company in 2021. The reason was the management’s refusal to implement the chatbot developed by Shazir together with his colleague Daniel De Freitas.
Birth of Character.AI
After leaving Google, Freitas and Shazir created Character.AI - a startup that became one of the most famous in the field of artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley. Last year the company was valued at $1 billion. In August, Character.AI announced 20 million monthly active users and announced a deal to join Google's artificial intelligence division DeepMind.
Noam Shazir has agreed to return to Google after the corporation licensed the technology from his startup Character.AI for $2.7 billion.
Deal with Google
According to The Wall Street Journal , Google paid Character.AI $2.7 billion to license the technology and bring Shazir and his team to work in its division. What's special about the licensing agreement is that it allows Google immediate access to Character.AI's intellectual property without having to go through the complex regulatory processes that would be required to acquire the company outright.
Valuable Specialist
Google employees note that the addition of Character.AI was seen primarily as an opportunity to bring back Shazir. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt praised the specialist's abilities, declaring his potential to create AI capable of performing at the level of human intelligence.
At a speech at Stanford University in 2015, Schmidt said of Shazira: "If anyone in the world can do it, it will be him."
The Meena project and the future of Gemini
The Google bot originally proposed by Shazir was called Meena and was intended for text communication with users. The engineer saw this product as a potential replacement for Google's search engine, but the company did not support his concept.
Google is now introducing Shazir as one of the key developers of the next version of Gemini, the company's proprietary AI model that competes with OpenAI's popular ChatGPT. It's worth noting that Gemini recently had its image generation feature temporarily removed due to inaccurate and offensive results. I wonder if Shazir can solve these problems and improve the system's performance?
Glossary
- Google is the largest technology company specializing in Internet services and products
- Character.AI is an artificial intelligence startup founded by former Google employees
- DeepMind is a division of Google that develops artificial intelligence
- Gemini - AI model developed by Google to compete with ChatGPT
- OpenAI - the company behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT
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Answers to questions
What happened to the Google software engineer three years ago?
What success has the startup Character.AI achieved?
Why is Google interested in bringing back Noam Shazir?
How much did Google pay for Character.AI technology?
What role does Noam Shazeer currently play at Google?
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Discussion of the topic – Google paid $2.7 billion to bring back an AI genius: the story of an engineer whose project was rejected
The story of how Google engineer Noam Shazir developed an AI chatbot, which the company rejected, leading to him leaving and creating his own startup. Three years later, Google has spent billions to bring back the talent.
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