Google paid $2.7 billion to bring back IT genius Noam Shazir, who is now a vice president of the corporation and heads the development of the Gemini chatbot. To accomplish this task, Google bought the licenses of the startup that Shazir founded after leaving the company, writes The Wall Street Journal.
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Shazir and his partner launched the chatbot Meena while working at Google between 2017 and 2021, but the corporation refused to present it publicly. After this, Shazir left Google, accusing the corporation of bureaucracy, and founded the startup Character.AI.
Within two years, the startup attracted $150 million in investments and received the status of a “unicorn” – a non-public company with an enterprise valuation of over $1 billion. However, in an attempt to attract additional investments while competing with OpenAI, Shazir decided to make a deal with Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and sold it licenses for its products.
Sources told the paper that the deal with startup Character.AI, founded by Shazir, included a provision for his return to Google. He is now a vice president at Google and leads the development of the Gemini chatbot. Along with Shazir, his startup partner Meena, Daniel de Freitas, and 30 other employees joined Google.
Author:
Kirill Bilyk
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
