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Shazeer will serve as a technical lead on Gemini, joining the
other co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, the company said
in a memo to staff.
Gemini is the line of AI models being developed by DeepMind,
Google's AI division, and which are being integrated into
products such as Search and Pixel smartphones.
Shazeer recently rejoined Google from the chatbot maker he
founded in 2021 with the U.S. tech giant paying billions to
bring him and a handful of other employees into DeepMind and to
strike a licensing agreement with 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 seen by Reuters.
The memo was first reported by The Information.
Shazeer first joined Google in 2000, two years after its
inception, and was a co-author of a seminal 2017 research paper
which catalyzed the current AI boom.
Character.AI utilizes the technical advancements pioneered in
the paper. It has raised $193 million and was valued at $1
billion last year by venture capitalists.
Google was in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in
Character.AI, Reuters reported in November, but instead decided
to bring Shazeer back in.
The deal, which resembles similar moves by Amazon and Microsoft
to nab top talent from AI startups, comes at a time when the Big
Tech companies are facing regulatory scrutiny.
Though they are not acquisitions, the other two deals are
nevertheless being examined by the Federal Trade Commission.
This month, a U.S. judge ruled that Google’s search engine
violated antitrust law, spending billions of dollars to create
an illegal monopoly.
(Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Edwina
Gibbs)
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