At a time when tech companies are paying eye-popping sums to hire the best minds in artificial intelligence, Google’s deal to rehire Noam Shazeer has left others in the dust. 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. Within Google, Shazeeer’s return is widely viewed as the primary reason the company agreed to pay the multibillion-dollar licensing fee. The arrangement has thrust him into the middle of a debate in Silicon Valley about whether tech giants are overspending in the race to develop cutting-edge AI, which some believe will define the future of computing. “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?” It is a remarkable turn of events after Shazeer publicly said the search giant had become too risk-averse in developing AI. The 48-year-old engineer is now one of three people leading Google’s efforts to build the next version of its most powerful AI technology, Gemini. Shazeer made hundreds of millions of dollars from his stake in Character as part of the deal, according to one of the knowledgeable people. The payout is unusually large for a founder who didn’t sell his company or take it public. Google declined to make Shazeer available for an interview, and he didn’t respond to requests for comment. 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.
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