Google appoints former Character.AI founder as co-lead of its AI models

Google has appointed Noam Shazeer, the former head of startup Character.AI and before that a long-time Google researcher, to co-lead its main AI project.

Shazeer will serve as a technical lead on Gemini, joining the other co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, the company said in a memo to staff.

Gemini is the line of AI models being developed by DeepMind, Google's AI division, and which are being integrated into products such as Search and Pixel smartphones.

Shazeer recently rejoined Google from the chatbot maker he founded in 2021 with the U.S. tech giant paying billions to bring him and a handful of other employees into DeepMind and to strike a licensing agreement with Character.AI.

"We are thrilled to join the best team on earth building the most valuable technology on earth," Shazeer wrote in an email reply to the memo which was seen by Reuters.

The memo was first reported by The Information.

Shazeer first joined Google in 2000, two years after its inception, and was a co-author of a seminal 2017 research paper which catalyzed the current AI boom.

Character.AI utilizes the technical advancements pioneered in the paper. It has raised $193 million and was valued at $1 billion last year by venture capitalists.

Google was in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI, Reuters reported in November, but instead decided to bring Shazeer back in.

The deal, which resembles similar moves by Amazon and Microsoft to nab top talent from AI startups, comes at a time when the Big Tech companies are facing regulatory scrutiny.

Though they are not acquisitions, the other two deals are nevertheless being examined by the Federal Trade Commission.

This month, a U.S. judge ruled that Google’s search engine violated antitrust law, spending billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly.