Google ‘rehires’ AI experts by buying startup for $2.7 billion

Google has made an interesting hire to strengthen the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) team. The real innovation is Noam Shazercomputer scientist and entrepreneur The one that has been in the company until 2021 and is considered an expensive supplement for giant.

The reason for this is Shazeer cost $2.7 billion (or R$14.8 billion in direct currency conversion) will be leased back. This was the amount Google paid to acquire Character.AI, a startup he founded shortly after leaving the company, and incorporate the entire team.

Character.AI is a kind of A repository of AI chatbots with specific roles and personalitiesOn the site, you can choose to chat with a machine that is more willing to discuss or ask questions, help write a story, or pretend to be a certain character.

Google has so far not confirmed what the plans are for the startup, which will continue to operate independently. Some employees remain on the original team, but some of the team, including the co-founders, have been taken over by Google and will work for the company itself.

Why did this signature attract so much attention?

according to Wall Street JournalGoogle’s move will be another proof of this Tech giants will spend a lot of money on artificial intelligence — The amount that the startup paid is quite high, especially for a service that still yields very little results in practice.

Moreover, internal sources claim that rehiring Shazeer was Google’s real goal. The engineer is seen as a renowned expert in his field, especially because Write an article about future predictive technologies in text generation in 2017.

The article lays out one of the foundations of generative AI in the company, even before the name was adopted for functions currently performed by services such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

Later, Together with his Brazilian colleague Daniel De Freitascreated a chatbot called Meena that could replace search engines in the future. The project was never commercially released.

Despite, Shazeer later openly criticized the company leave the office. He said that Google was “too risk-averse” in developing AIShazeer and Daniel, who updated their LinkedIn to a “research scientist” role at the DeepMind lab, are now part of Google again.