Noam Shazeer, an AI/ML scientist and research worker, was with Google for 20 years, and then walked away to set up Character.AI. He has returned to Google at an astronomical price of $ 2.7 billion or Rs 23000 crore in Indian currency.
Noam Shazeer is 48 now. He is extraordinarily brilliant and a trailblazer. He lives in Silicon Valley, California, which is the beating heart of the international tech revolution. Noam’s coding skills are dazzling. At Duke, he learnt computer science and mathematics. The subject gave him a deep understanding of algorithms, data structures and mathematical modeling. He joins Google in early 2000s, after his academics are over.
He designed Google’s spelling correction system. He elevated it to an unprecedented accuracy. Spelling snafus could be solved by mathematics, owing to geniuses such as Noam.
In 2016, he developed sparsely gated mixture of experts. He designed personally the multi-head attention of Transformer architecture. He facilitated its implementation by coding. He was a major contributor to Google’s LaMDA dialogue system in 2019. This project was led by Daniel De Freitas (who later cofounded Character.AI with Noam).
Noam Shazeer had a conducive home environment. His father was a polyglot engineer. His mother valued education and curiosity. She was a homemaker.
De Fritas, along with his mother, lived in various countries such as Venezuela and the UK. Ultimately the family settled in Florida along with his adoptive father. His upbringing was multi-cultural. It paved the way for strong foundation in natural language processing (NLP).
While at Google, Noam and Freitas developed Meena — an advanced chatbot with conversational skills. Google did not push this project forward. Disillusioned, Noam and Frietas left Google. They co-founded Character.AI, a platform for generative AI. The conversations could be carried out with fictional characters and historical figures. They could be conducted with customized personas. Users could do role playing or could conduct fantasy-based conversations. It led to complications, some of which were legal.
There is a twist in the story. Noam Shazeer and Freitas — both returned to Google in August 2024. The return of the prodigal sons. Shazeer reportedly received a staggering $ 2.7 billion to come into Google’s fold.
Google welcomed back Noam Shazeer, a preeminent researcher in ML who is joined DeepMind. Freitas too returns to the search titan. It is monumental homecoming.
In this high-stake world of AI, there are pushes and pulls. They returned on their own terms. The future is wide open.
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