Noam Shazeer joined Google as a full-time software engineer in December 2008, at the heights of the global recession. He left the search engine giant in October 2019 as the Principal Software Engineer to join Character AI as its CEO until August 2024, when he was again lured back by the Sundar Pichai-led firm for a staggering $2.7 billion cheque. He now helms the silicon valley behemoth as an LLM developer with some incredible inventions under the belt in the domain, including Transformer in 2017, Mesh-Tensorflow in 2018, and T5 in 2019, among others. He also spearheaded the LaMDA dialog system at Google, which was led by project head Daniel De Freitas, with whom he later co-founded the Character AI artificial intelligence startup. Character AI developed an AI chatbot that excelled in mimicking celebrity voices. Noam Shazeer's rehire with a hefty paycheck is dubbed as proof of the techie’s AI genius and that Google is leaving no stones unturned in its endeavor to dominate the field. The Noam Shazeer rehire comes in the heels of all the C-suite executives leaving Sam Altman’s OpenAI, even as Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta AI and Satya Nadella-led Microsoft are trying to poach more AI talent. Having Noam back in the fold is being dubbed by tech pundits as a trump card for Google, as the industry is poised to grow in trillions of dollars in coming decade, with every startup worth its salt vying for the AI pie.
Google has re-hired AI pioneer Noam Shazeer for approximately $2.7 billion, following his departure in 2021 to start character-AI. https://t.co/gF0UVUhff5— Cheddar (@cheddar) September 25, 2024
tl;dr this guy Noam Shazeer's brain is worth $2.7 billion dollars to Google🧠https://t.co/b2m74PHgsY— Ari Driessen (@AriDriessen) September 25, 2024
TIL Noam Shazeer also built out Google’s spelling correction system: pic.twitter.com/pNgo5xUmUj— Sharif Shameem (@sharifshameem) April 2, 2024
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 https://t.co/kDEMsD6e98— WSJ Business News (@WSJbusiness) September 25, 2024
See Also: Gmail’s Creator Reveals The Real Reason Why Sundar Pichai-Led Google Lagged In AI Search Race