Google paid $ 2.7 billion to license the technology of AI startup Character AI, which was founded in 2021 by the former employee of the IT giant Noam Shazir. According to the source, Google's main goal was to bring back to the company the IT genius who became known for his research in the field of artificial intelligence. Shazeer is currently a vice president at Google and works on the development of the company's AI algorithms, such as Gemini.
The report says that in the name of Shazeer's return, Google has agreed to pay a huge licensing fee. Shazir has made hundreds of millions of dollars from his stake in startup Character AI, according to a source familiar with the matter. It is noted that the amount paid by Google is unusually large for a founder who did not sell his company and did not take it public.
Noam Shazir has worked at Google since 2000. In 2017, he and a group of other authors published a paper called "Attention is all you need," which became the basis for generative neural network technology. Later, he and his colleagues created the chatbot Meena and predicted that in the near future the chatbot could replace the Google search engine and bring in trillions of dollars in revenue. Google refused to release the chatbot publicly, and Shazir left the company in 2021, accusing the giant of red tape in integrating the technology into consumer products.
He later created the startup Character AI, which two years later attracted $150 million in investment and was valued at $1 billion. Amid competition from OpenAI and Microsoft, Shazir tried to raise more funding for his startup and eventually managed to reach an agreement with Alphabet. , the parent company of Google. As a result of the deal, Shazir and several dozen other Character AI employees are back at Google.