Google Spent $2.7 Billion to Recuperate One AI Scientist

 

 

 

“It’s obvious that Noam is a wonderful person there. Is he a hundred times better than everyone else?

Rehiring AI guru Noam Shazeer reportedly cost Google $2.7 billion, an incredible sum of money for just one computer scientist’s knowledge.

Shazeer left Google in 2021 to create his own startup, Character, after 21 years of employment there. Artificial intelligence (AI), which lets users converse with chatbots posing as well-known individuals or imaginative characters.
Presumably to license its technology, Google gave the company billions of dollars. However, the Wall Street Journal notes that “the main reason” for this is that Shazeer’s homecoming is “widely regarded.” as to why the tech giant cut the check.

The transaction reveals the extent of the financial resources that tech giants are allocating to gain a possible advantage in the AI arms race. Simultaneously, investors in Silicon Valley have recently become increasingly anxious that firms such as Google and Microsoft are squandering billions of dollars with no apparent return, creating a gigantic bubble that is about to explode.
You need look no farther than a corporation that invested close to three billion dollars to entice one engineer back.

Christopher Manning, director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, told the Wall Street Journal that Noam “is clearly a great person in that space.” Is he, however, “20 times as good as other people?”

Looking through windows
Shazeer received hundreds of millions of dollars for his investment in the company, WSJ-speaking sources said, even though he did not get Google’s $2.7 billion in whole or directly as part of the transaction. That’s still a sizable salary, particularly considering Shazeer maintained the secrecy of his firm.

A key component of Google’s early AI development efforts was Shazeer. Most people think that a paper he coauthored in 2017 is the first evidence of enormous language models as we know them today.

He is always willing to provide a helping hand. He claims on his LinkedIn page that “I have invented much of the current revolution in large language models.”

The Wall Street Journal claims that the computer scientist left Google when the company decided not to release the Meena chatbot to the public in 2021 because of security concerns.

Paradoxically, ChatGPT was released by OpenAI a year later, exposing a significant lost chance for Google.
It was announced in August that Shazeer would rejoin Google as part of Alphabet, the corporation that owns Google, and Character.AI.

IT behemoths like Microsoft and Amazon are vying for the services of AI experts like Shazeer, as evidenced by a number of previous deals of a same nature. For example, under a technology license agreement, Amazon hired senior executives from the AI firm Adept in June.

But as businesses keep throwing billions into this still completely unproven and environmentally harmful technology, investors are beginning to raise some serious concerns. Is it truly worth spending billions of dollars to recruit someone with the experience of a single job, or is it just a massive financial waste that will never pay off? We have no choice but to watch this unfold.