Google paid $2.7bln to get a single AI researcher back

Google reportedly spent $2.7 billion to rehire AI expert Noam Shazeer — an astonishing amount of money for what boils down to the expertise of a single computer scientist, The Byte reported.

Shazeer left Google in 2021 after 21 years at the company to start his own startup called Character.AI, which allows users to interact with chatbots that roleplay as imaginary characters or well-known figures.

The official reason Google gave billions of dollars to the startup was to license its tech. But as the Wall Street Journal reports, “Shazeer’s return is widely viewed as the primary reason” as to why the tech giant cut the check.

The deal highlights just how much money tech companies are spending to get a potential edge in the AI arms race. In parallel, Silicon Valley investors have grown very concerned as of late that companies like Google or Microsoft are throwing away countless billions of dollars with no return in sight, inflating a massive bubble that is set to burst.

Look no further than a company spending nearly three billion on getting a single engineer to come back.

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