Google's investments for AI have skyrocketed. Google has paid $2.7 billion to rehire a man named Noam Shazeer, a previous Google employee, to help them with AI technology.

Why?

"A co-author of a seminal research paper that kicked off the AI boom, Shazeer quit Google in 2021 to start his own company after the search giant refused to release a chatbot he developed. When that startup, Character.AI, began to flounder, his old employer swooped in. Google wrote Character a check for around $2.7 billion, according to people with knowledge of the deal. The official reason for the payment was to license Character’s technology. But the deal included another component: Shazeer agreed to work for Google again" (Wall Street). 

Many people are questioning whether tech companies are overspending to compete in the race against AI. The payout was unusually large for a founder who didn’t sell his company or make it public. Google declined to make Shazeer available for an interview, and he didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“Noam is clearly a great person in that space,” said Christopher Manning, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “Is he 20 times as good as other people?”

Frustrations:

"Shazeer joined Google in 2000 as one of its first few hundred employees. His first major project was building a system to improve the search engine’s spelling-correction function. Shortly into his tenure, he asked then-CEO Eric Schmidt for access to thousands of computer chips.

“I’m going to solve general knowledge by the weekend,” Shazeer told Schmidt, the CEO recalled during a 2015 Stanford University talk. The early effort failed, but Schmidt grew confident Shazeer had what it took to build AI with human-level intelligence. 

“If there’s anybody I can think of in the world who’s likely to do it, it’s going to be him,” Schmidt said during the talk. In 2017, Shazeer published a paper with seven other Google researchers called “Attention is All You Need,” detailing a computer system that could reliably predict the next word in a sequence when prompted by humans. It became the underpinning of the generative AI technology that followed.

Shazeer teamed with a Google colleague, Daniel De Freitas, to build a chatbot originally named Meena that could banter confidently on a range of topics. In a widely circulated memo, “Meena Eats the World,” Shazeer predicted it could replace Google’s search engine and produce trillions of dollars in revenue, said people familiar with the document. 

Google executives declined to release the chatbot to the public, citing concerns around safety and fairness. Shazeer and De Freitas quit in 2021 to launch Character" (Wall Street).

What Now?

People who work on AI at Google said they don’t know what the company will do with the technology it licensed from Character. Shazeer, however, is already back to work at Google with the title of vice president. He has gone from running a company with hundreds of employees to focusing on research and supervising a handful of people, including De Freitas.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who played a key role in the deal to bring Shazeer back, said at a recent conference that the company was previously too timid in deploying AI applications. Now, he said, "Google is developing and launching AI technology as fast as it can."

Citations:

Kruppa, Miles, and Lauren Thomas. “Google Paid $2.7 Billion to Bring Back an AI Genius Who Quit in Frustration.” The Wall Street Journal, 25 September 2024, https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/noam-shazeer-google-ai-deal-d3605697?mod=business_lead_pos1. Accessed 29 September 2024.