Noam Shazeer, a long-time Google researcher and the former CEO of the company Character.AI, has been named by Google to co-lead its primary AI project.
The firm announced in a note to staff that Shazeer will join co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals as a technical lead on Gemini.
Character.AI makes use of the technological innovations that the paper pioneered. It has raised $193 million, and venture capitalists valued it at $1 billion the previous year.
There were conversations between Google and Character about hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.
Reuters stated in November that AI had been considered, but Shazeer was ultimately brought back.
Shazeer is going to work on the development of Gemini with Google’s veteran AI researchers Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals as it aims to challenge OpenAI’s GPT large language models (LLMs).
DeepMind, Google’s AI section, is developing a range of AI models called Gemini, which are included in products like Pixel devices and Search.
After leaving the chatbot startup he started in 2021, Shazeer recently joined Google again. The American tech giant paid billions to acquire him and a few other staff members into DeepMind and to get a license from Character.AI.
“We are thrilled to join the best team on earth building the most valuable technology on earth,” Shazeer wrote in an email reply to the memo, which was first reported by The Information.
We earlier reported that Google’s Fitbit is collaborating with Peloton Interactive to give its premium users access to the exercise equipment manufacturer’s fitness content.
According to a press statement from Peloton, Fitbit users without a Premium subscription will only be able to attend a subset of Peloton sessions, while Fitbit Premium members will have access to all of those classes starting in September.
