Noam Shazeer, a 48-year-old software engineer who was first hired by Google as one of its first few hundred employees back in 2000, left the company in 2021 after it refused his request to release a chat bot that he had developed with a colleague, Daniel De Freitas.
Shazeer’s return to Google is widely viewed among company employees as the primary reason behind the acquisition of Character.AI, the Journal reported. Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas left Google in 2021 after it refused to release the chat bot they had jointly developed.In 2017, Shazeer and another Google colleague, De Freitas, teamed up to create Meena, a chat bot that could engage humans on a range of issues.
Google tapped Shazeer, who netted hundreds of millions of dollars in the transaction, to be one of three people who will lead the company’s efforts to build the next version of Gemini, Google’s next-generation AI model that was built to compete with rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.