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shazier (left)

phoenix technology news, september 25, beijing time: in the era of artificial intelligence (ai), technology companies are willing to spend a lot of money to recruit top talents. in this regard, google has left other companies far behind.

noam shazeer joined google in 2000 as one of the company's first few hundred employees. shazeer co-authored a seminal research paper that sparked the ai ​​boom. however, after google refused to release a chatbot shazeer developed, he left google in 2021 and started his own company, character.ai.however, character.ai subsequently ran into trouble, and google quickly moved to bring shazier back to the company.

people familiar with the matter said that google wrote a check for about us$2.7 billion (about 18.96 billion yuan) to character.ai. the official reason was to obtain character.ai's technology license, but the deal actually included another part: shazier agreed to work for google again.within google, shazier's return is widely believed to be the main reason why google agreed to pay the high licensing fee.

as part of the deal, shazier made hundreds of millions of dollars from his stake in character.ai.it’s a tidy payoff for a founder who didn’t sell his company or take it public. the 48-year-old engineer is now one of three leaders of google’s ai technology, tasked with developing the next version of gemini, its most powerful ai chatbot.

the deal puts shazier in the middle of a silicon valley debate over whether tech giants are overspending in the race to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence, which some say will define the future of computing. "shazier is clearly a brilliant mind in this field, but is he really 20 times better than everyone else?" said christopher manning, director of stanford university's ai lab.

as of press time, google declined to make shazier available for an interview. shazier did not respond to a request for comment. (author/xiao yu)

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