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The original was posted on /r/singularity by /u/blit_blit99 on 2024-09-25 18:17:22+00:00.
From an article dated 9-25-2024:
Google Paid $2.7 Billion to Bring Back an AI Genius Who Quit in Frustration (msn.com)
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.
(snip)
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.
(snip)
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.
Full article in the link above.