Google Paid $2.7 Billion to Bring Back an AI Genius Who Quit in Frustration – WSJ

At a time when tech companies are paying eye-popping sums to hire the best minds in artificial intelligence, Google s deal to rehire Noam Shazeer has left others in the dust. 

A co-author of a seminal research paper that kicked off the AI boom, Shazeer quit Google in 2021 to start his own company after the search giant refused to release a chatbot he developed. When that startup, Character.AI, began to flounder, his old employer swooped in.

Google wrote Character a check for around $2.7 billion, according to people with knowledge of the deal. The official reason for the payment was to license Character s technology. But the deal included another component: Shazeer agreed to work for Google again.

Within Google, Shazeer s return is widely viewed as the primary reason the company agreed to pay the multibillion-dollar licensing fee.

The arrangement has thrust him into the middle of a debate in Silicon Valley about whether tech giants are overspending in the race to develop cutting-edge AI, which some believe will define the future of computing. 

via www.wsj.com

I’m betting AI is the future and that’s because it’s the only way I see the US crawling its way out of our debt crisis, which nobody seems to care much about (except the wise readers of the RC of course). Of course, it may not work, in which case it’s going to get pretty uncomfortable. I don’t put much faith in Google, though.