SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 22 (Reuters) – Google (GOOGL.O) has appointed Noam Shazeer, the former head of startup Character.AI and a longtime Google researcher before that, to co-lead a major AI project at the company.
In a memo to employees, the company said Shaziel would join co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Viñals as Gemini's technical leaders.
Gemini is a line of AI models being developed by Google's AI division, DeepMind, and integrated into products such as Search and Pixel phones.
Shazier recently rejoined Google, the chatbot maker he founded, in 2021. The US tech giant paid billions of dollars to bring Shazier and several other employees to DeepMind and enter into a licensing deal with Character.AI.
“I am thrilled to join the best team on the planet developing some of the most valuable technologies on the planet,” Shazia said in an email response to the memo seen by Reuters.
The memo was first reported by The Information.
Shazia joined Google in 2000, two years after it was founded, and co-authored a key 2017 research paper that sparked the current AI boom.
Character.AI leverages the technological advances pioneered in the paper. The company raised $193 million from venture capitalists last year and was valued at $1 billion.
Reuters reported in November that Google was in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI but instead decided to bring Shazeer back on board. The deal, similar to similar moves by Amazon (AMZN.O)(opens new tab) and Microsoft (MSFT.O)(opens new tab) to acquire talent from AI startups, comes at a time when Big Tech companies are facing regulatory scrutiny. While not acquisitions, the other two deals are also under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. This month, a U.S. judge ruled that Google's search engine violated antitrust laws and spent billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly.
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Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Edwina Gibbs
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