Person
Noam Shazeer
Noam Shazeer is an AI researcher who was a lead author of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the transformer architecture that underlies almost every large language model built since. After years at Google he left in 2021 — reportedly after the company declined to release a chatbot he had built — and co-founded Character.AI, one of the most-used consumer chatbot platforms, where users create and talk to AI "characters." In 2024 Google brought him back through a licensing-and-hiring deal reported at $2.5–2.7 billion, and he became a co-lead of its Gemini model effort. The deal's structure, which avoided a formal acquisition, later drew antitrust scrutiny.
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- Models & capabilities 2
- Courts & copyright 1
- Culture & impact 1
- Security & misuse 1
- Money & business 1
- Labs & people 1
A mother sues Character.AI after her son's death
The complaint sought damages for wrongful death and product liability; Character.AI called the death tragic and said it had since added self-harm safeguards for users.
Courts & copyright · Culture & impact · Security & misuse
Google takes Character.AI's founders back
The deal, reported at $2.5–2.7 billion, licensed Character.AI's technology to Google without buying the company, and drew Justice Department scrutiny.
Money & business · Labs & people
Character.AI launches public beta
Founded by two former Google engineers behind Meena and LaMDA, the site logged hundreds of thousands of user interactions within three weeks of its beta launch.
Models & capabilities
Google trains a 1.6-trillion-parameter Switch Transformer
Routing each input to a single expert rather than blending several simplified prior mixture-of-experts designs, and the paper reported up to 7x faster pre-training than a dense T5 baseline.
Models & capabilities
Also mentioned in 3 entries
Referenced in passing — Noam Shazeer isn't the main subject of these.