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Editor: Peach

At the beginning of the month, the founder of the star startup Character.AI and 30 employees joined Google collectively, shocking the bigwigs in the AI ​​circle.

The founder and core author of Transformer, Noam Shazeer, can be said to have "returned" to Google.

He resigned in 2021 and founded this AI unicorn on his own.

The Information reported that according to internal employee sources, Shazeer will serve as co-technical director of Gemini, Google's most important AI program.

That means he will be working with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals to develop Gemini.

The latest personnel arrangement is Google's attempt to fight backOpenAI、MicrosoftAn important step for large companies such asChatGPTLarge ModelCompetitive AI.

They are spread across different groups like data, evaluation, infrastructure, instruction fine-tuning, context, MoE, multimodal speech, etc.

Those with an * after their names have left their jobs to found startups.

In February this year, the fourth Gemini lead developer, Ioannis Antonoglou, founded an AI startup in London.

The ones with two * at the end are people who left to join OpenAI, such as Amelia Glaese (who worked at Google for more than 6 years).

In addition, Gemini team leaderJeff Dean, no further introduction is needed.

Another person in chargeOriol Vinyals, was the head of DeepMind's deep learning team, led AlphaStar to defeat professional players, and has worked at Google for ten years.

Unlike the OpenAI team, which often has Chinese faces, judging from the list, there seem to be only three Chinese core members of the Gemini team.

Andrew Dai

Andrew Dai graduated from Cambridge University with a bachelor's degree in computer science and received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. During his Ph.D., he did two software engineering internships at Google. After graduating with his Ph.D. in 2012, he joined Google and is currently the Chief Research Scientist/Director, leading the data group in the development of Gemini.

Yuanzhong Xu

Yuanzhong Xu graduated with a bachelor's degree in information engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016, he worked at Facebook for 8 months and then joined Google as a software engineer in 2017.

In 2022, Xu moved to DeepMind as a senior software engineer and has now become a chief engineer, responsible for parallel work on the code base in Gemini development.

Jilin Chen

Jilin Chen graduated from Peking University in 2006 with a bachelor's and master's degree in information and computing science. He then went to the University of Minnesota to pursue a doctorate. He has worked at Microsoft Research Asia, Palo Alto Research Center, and IBM Research, and joined Google as a software engineer in 2014.

Chen is responsible for leading the security group within the Gemini team.

What does it mean for Shazeer to become one of Gemini’s co-technical leaders?

Earlier, there was news thatMuskThere are even rumors that Meta is interested in this acquisition.

Unexpectedly, it was eventually acquired by Google for US$27.

It can be seen that the popularity of Character.AI shows that the technical strength behind it should not be underestimated.

While at Google, founder Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas led the Lamda team, which focused on developing conversational language programs.

However, the project never actually launched because Google was afraid of the consequences of saying the wrong thing.

Even in 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine was fired for telling the Washington Post that he believed Lamda was sentient.

A year ago, they co-founded Character.AI, which used similar Lamda technology in its development.

They offer a website where people can chat with anyone, living or dead, real or imagined.

As soon as this app came out, it became a hit.

Many people, especially young people, have fallen in love with the process of chatting with various virtual characters.

A VC once wrote that many people don’t realize how many young Americans are extremely addicted to CharacterAI. The monthly visits alone exceed 250 million times, and there are about 20 million users per month.

What’s most impressive is that this is about 2B queries per day, accounting for 20% of Google searches!

After more than two years of development, Character.AI has accumulated more than 20 million users.

With its impressive founder background and popular AI products, Character.AI raised $150 million in financing led by a16z in March 2024, with a valuation of $1 billion.

In addition to founding a powerful unicorn, Noam Shazeer is also the core author of the revolutionary Transformer.

All the eight great Googlers left Google, but now Shazeer has returned.

This shows that Shazeer has enough strength to lead Gemini.

The main reason why Google did this is that it is clearly lagging behind Microsoft and other companies in the AI ​​battle and wants to catch up.

First, the Google Brain and DeepMind teams were integrated into one team - Google DeepMind.

Then, Demis Hassabis was put in charge.

Even so, there are still constraints between the teams and the tension has not dissipated.

At the same time, Hassabis has not yet adjusted to the reality of having to manage 182,000 employees at once.

In addition, DeepMind, which he led, enjoys a high degree of independence within Google, allowing it to focus onAIResearch without worrying about commercialization.

Now, Hassabis is facing the dual pressure of working closely with other members and turning technology into products.

That has left Hassabis deeply frustrated, according to two people familiar with the situation who have spoken with him in recent months.

More recently, Hassabis has again made organizational changes to give pure AI research some influence back within Google.

In March, he reorganized the executive team to have more research directors report directly to him.

All executives in charge of AI, including Pushmeet Kohli, Raia Hadsell, and Zoubin Ghahrama, will report to Hassabis and no longer report to Koray Kavukcuoglu, who is in charge of the 1,000-person Gemini project.

The Gemini model has also been iterated many times, narrowing the gap with OpenAI but not eliminating it.

In addition, the birth of Sora shocked the industry, and even Hassabis himself admitted that it was particularly difficult for Google to catch up with its competitors in this field.

As for the loss of top talent, as mentioned earlier, some researchers left, some started their own businesses, and some joined competitors.

Even so, in this AI race, Google has no way out and can only readjust its combat posture to meet new challenges.