Who is Noam Shazeer? AI leader Google paid $2.7 billion to hire, now sparking internal tensions – Crypto News – Crypto News
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Who is Noam Shazeer? AI leader Google paid $2.7 billion to hire, now sparking internal tensions Who is Noam Shazeer? AI leader Google paid $2.7 billion to hire, now sparking internal tensions

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Who is Noam Shazeer? AI leader Google paid $2.7 billion to hire, now sparking internal tensions – Crypto News

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Google made headlines in late 2024 when it re-hired Noam Shazeer via a licensing deal with Character.AI. Shazeer, who was an early Google employee, later worked for the Google DeepMind division and is said to have started working on the development of Gemini.

However, if a new report by The Information is to be believed, Shazeer has helped meaningfully shape Gemini since his return to Google, but some of his statements have angered his colleagues and prompted Google to censor him.

The matter came to the fore after one of the comments made by Shazeer in one of the company’s internal discussion forums about how Google employees could support their transgender and non-binary colleagues.

​“I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender,” Shazeer wrote in a post quoted by the publication.

“I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilise children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them,” he added.

xAI owner Elon Musk, who has been known to voice his opinions against what he considers the ‘woke mind virus’, also came out in support of Shazeer in a post on X. He wrote, “Noam is right.”

Who is Noam Shazeer?

Noam Shazeer was among the early Google employees, joining the company back in 2000. The techie was part of the Google Brain team and was even co-author of the seminal “Attention Is All You Need” paper that has supposedly transformed the whole industry with the introduction of the Transformer model — the architecture used behind modern large language models (LLMs).

During his stint at Google, Shazeer and his colleagues built a chatbot called Meena, and after the company’s refusal to release it to the public, he left the tech giant.

He went on to start Character.AI in 2021, an AI startup that allows users to chat with an AI avatar of famous real and fictional characters.

After ChatGPT changed the AI landscape in 2022, Google also went full throttle with its AI efforts, releasing the Bard chatbot, which was later renamed Gemini. Amid the ongoing AI race, Google struck a licensing deal with Character.AI which saw the AI startup’s co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, along with a few members of its research team, joining the tech giant.

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