Google has named Noam Shazeer, a veteran Google researcher and the former CEO of startup Character.AI, as a co-leader of its flagship AI project.
TakeAway Points:
- Google has appointed Noam Shazeer, the former head of startup Character.AI and, before that, a long-time Google researcher, to co-lead its main AI project.
- Shazeer will serve as a technical lead on Gemini, joining the other co-leaders, Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, the company said in a memo to staff.
- Also, Intel revealed that director Lip-Bu Tan, a seasoned veteran of the semiconductor sector who was brought in two years ago to aid in the chipmaker’s turnaround push, had left the board.
Shazeer becomes co-leader at Character.AI
Shazeer will serve as a technical lead on Gemini, joining the other co-leaders, Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, the company said in a memo to staff.
Gemini is the line of AI models being developed by DeepMind, Google’s AI division, and which are being integrated into products such as Search and Pixel smartphones.
Shazeer recently rejoined Google from the chatbot maker he founded in 2021, with the U.S. tech giant paying billions to bring him and a handful of other employees into DeepMind and to strike a licensing agreement with Character.AI.
“We are thrilled to join the best team on earth building the most valuable technology on earth,” Shazeer wrote in an email reply to the memo, which was first reported by The Information.
Shazeer first joined Google in 2000, two years after its inception, and was a co-author of a seminal 2017 research paper that catalyzed the current AI boom.
Character.AI utilizes the technical advancements pioneered in the paper. It has raised $193 million and was valued at $1 billion last year by venture capitalists.
Google was in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI, Reuters reported in November, but instead decided to bring Shazeer back in.
The deal, which resembles similar moves by Amazon and Microsoft to nab top talent from AI startups, comes at a time when big tech companies are facing regulatory scrutiny.
Though they are not acquisitions, the other two deals are nevertheless being examined by the Federal Trade Commission.
This month, a U.S. judge ruled that Google’s search engine violated antitrust law by spending billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly.
Lip-Bu Tan exits Intel’s board
Intel’s director, Lip-Bu Tan, a semiconductor industry veteran brought in two years ago to help with the chipmaker’s comeback effort, has stepped down from its board, the chipmaker disclosed in a filing on Thursday.
Tan informed the company on Monday that he was resigning from the board effective immediately.
The news of Tan’s departure comes at a challenging time for Intel, which recently forecast
third-quarter revenue below market estimates and announced plans to cut more than 15% of its workforce, approximately 17,500 employees, and suspend its dividend starting in the fourth quarter.
“This is a personal decision based on a need to reprioritize various commitments, and I remain supportive of the company and its important work,” Tan said in a statement.
Tan, who has served as executive chair and CEO of Cadence Design Systems Inc, joined Intel’s board in Sept. 2022.
Shares of the company were slightly up in extended trading. They closed down 6.1% at $20.10 on Thursday.
