<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
However, if a new report by The Information is to be believed, Shazeer has helped meaningfully shape Gemini since his return to Google<\/a>, but some of his statements have angered his colleagues and prompted Google to censor him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u200b\u201cI do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender,\u201d Shazeer wrote in a post quoted by the publication.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n xAI owner Elon Musk<\/a>, who has been known to voice his opinions against what he considers the \u2018woke mind virus\u2019, also came out in support of Shazeer in a post on X. He wrote, \u201cNoam is right.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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 \u201cAttention Is All You Need\u201d paper that has supposedly transformed the whole industry with the introduction of the Transformer model \u2014 the architecture used behind modern large language models (LLMs<\/a>).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nWho is Noam Shazeer?<\/h2>\n