Google spent $2.7 billion to rehire its IT guy — he was rejected for «uninteresting» product

Three years ago, a software engineer proposed an AI chatbot project to Google, but it was rejected, and the man quit the company to found his own startup.

Noam Shazir joined Google back in 2000 — among the first hundred employees, but he left the company in 2021 after the company refused to release the chatbot that he developed with his colleague Daniel De Freitas.

In the following years, Freitas and Shazir founded Character.AI — now one of the most famous AI startups in Silicon Valley, which was valued at $1 billion last year. In August, Character.AI reported that its products had 20 million monthly active users and at the same time announced a deal to acquire to Google’s artificial intelligence division DeepMind.

Ноам Шазір погодився повернутися в Google після того, як компанія заплатила $2,7 мільярда за ліцензію на технологію його стартапу Character.AI. — Noam Shazir has agreed to return to Google after the company paid $2.7 billion to license the technology of his startup Character.AI.

According to The Wall Street JournalGoogle paid Character.AI $2.7 billion to license the technology and bring Shazir and his team to the division. The license agreement is special in that it allows Google to access Character.AI’s intellectual property immediately and without regulatory approvals and other bureaucracy (as would be the case in a full acquisition).

The publication, citing employees, writes that the acquisition of Character.AI was primarily seen as an opportunity to bring back Shazir. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt admired the specialist, claiming that he could build AI capable of working on a par with human intelligence.

«If there is anyone in the world who is likely to do it, it will be him», — Schmidt said of Shazir during a speech at Stanford University in 2015.

The bot that Shazir initially proposed to Google was called Meena and was supposed to respond to people’s queries with text. The engineer believed that the product — was what would replace Google’s search engine one day, but the company did not support his idea.

Today, Google introduces Shazir as one of the leaders of development of the next version of Gemini — the company’s own AI model that competes with the most popular ChatGPT from OpenAI. We remind you that this year Gemini has been temporarily deprived of the ability to generate images after inaccurate and offensive results. I wonder if Shazir will be able to fix these problems