Google Reportedly Spent $2.7 Billion to Rehire Character.AI Founder

Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to rehire ex-employee/AI guru Noam Shazeer.

According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Shazeer, who co-authored research that helped popularize artificial intelligence (AI), left Google in frustration after the company refused to release a chatbot he had developed.

He started his own company, Character.AI, which became known for its AI chatbots that could replicate a range of personalities and fictional characters. Earlier this year, Google announced that Shazeer would be coming back to the company as part of a major licensing deal.

The price tag of that deal was around $2.7 billion, the WSJ said, citing sources with knowledge of the arrangement. They say that deal included another stipulation: Shazeer agreed to return to Google. It’s a situation, the report adds, that sits at the heart of a debate about whether tech giants are spending too much in their race to build cutting-edge AI.

“Noam is clearly a great person in that space,” said Christopher Manning, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “Is he 20 times as good as other people?”

The report also notes that Shazeer’s return to Google came after he publicly stated that the company had become too timid about developing AI. Now, he’s one of the leaders of Google’s Gemini AI project.

One of the sources said Shazeer made hundreds of millions from his stake in Character as part of the deal, a sum the WSJ said is unusually high for a founder who didn’t sell their company or take it public.

PYMNTS has contacted Google for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

Meanwhile, Google announced this week that its generative AI solutions are now being used by more than 2 million developers.

“We’re inspired by what customers are building and excited how quickly they’ve been able to move ideas from experimentation into production with our Vertex AI platform,” Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post.

“We’re also seeing major boosts in productivity through Gemini for Google Workspace, with customers saving an average of 105 minutes per user, per week, according to our recent study of enterprise customers.”

The company also shared some examples of use cases of Google’s generative AI solutions and the benefits they are delivering. For instance, the Indonesian FinTech GoTo Group developed an AI-based voice assistant that helps users of its GoPay app find and use features just saying what they wish to do.