Google paid $2.7 billion to acquire AI startup Character.AI, but the real reason was to bring back Noam Shazeer, a talented AI researcher who left Google in 2021 to start his own company. Shazeer is now one of the leaders of Google's next-generation AI efforts.

Shazeer is a controversial figure. He is a brilliant researcher who co-authored a seminal paper on AI, but he can also be ambitious and impatient. Google was afraid to release a chatbot he developed, so he left to found Character.AI. Character.AI struggled financially and was eventually acquired by Google.

Google is not the only tech company spending big on AI. There is a race to develop cutting-edge AI, which some believe will define the future of computing. It is unclear what Google plans to do with the technology it acquired from Character.AI, but the company is now moving quickly to deploy AI applications.
#google #startup #techindustry #ai

свернуть