Character.ai founder to co-lead Gemini AI, says report

Google has reportedly put Character.ai founder Noam Shazeer in charge of its Gemini AI.

Shazeer worked in software engineering roles at Google for almost 18 years before leaving to found his own company. Now he’s returning to co-lead Google’s Gemini AI efforts alongside Jeff Dean and Orial Vinyals, The Information reported, quoting an internal memo.

The move follows the signing of a deal between Google and Character.ai earlier this month.

Google provided the startup with more funding in return for a non-exclusive license for its current LLM technology.

Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas — with whom he cofounded Character.ai in 2021 — were expected to join Google as part of the deal.

Other Character.ai employees were expected to stay with the company, though, expanding on the startup’s products, with the company’s general counsel, Dominic Perella, stepping in the role of interim CEO.

LexicaArt co-founder Sharif Shameem resurfaced an old anecdote about Shazeer’s hiring interview with Google during which he reportedly described a better way to correct spellings than the one Google was then using.

Shazeer is well respected in the field of AI, and has co-authored several research papers on the topic including important ones on LaMDA, PaLM, and ST-MoE.

Both LaMDA and PaLM have been heavily used by Google in its products and the company further expects to integrate Gemini into its products.

Google is not the only one courting expertise from startups. Rival cloud service providers such as Microsoft and AWS have also signed deals with smaller AI companies to either acquire the team behind their products, or their technology.

One of the biggest examples is Microsoft’s investment into OpenAI, following which Microsoft started integrating GPT-powered Copilots into all its products.AWS and Oracle, too, have heavily invested into Anthropic and Cohere respectively in order to better their generative AI services on offer.