Noam Shazeer, one of the inventors of the transformer models that caused the current AI boom, is now leading the charge at Google toward artificial general intelligence (that is, AI that’s generally smarter than human beings). Initially, Google was less aggressive than its peers when it came to and releasing generative AI to the world. But the company finally appears to have caught up, and that its Gemini models are at the very front of the cutting edge in large language models.
Despite facing stiff competition from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, Shazeer says Google is in a strong position to emerge as the leader in large frontier models. Google is “recommitting to our core values,” he says. In practice, that means putting the user in control of the AI, and committing the personnel and resources required for breakthrough tech development.
“Google has the most brilliant group of researchers in the world, as well as excellent, good-hearted leaders whom I know, love and respect,” Shazeer says. “Google developed and owns much of the technology behind the LLM revolution; bringing it back to Google is the right thing to do.”
Shazeer actually left Google in 2021 to start his own transformer-based chatbot company, Character.AI. At the time of his exit, Shazeer criticized Google for being too cautious about releasing new products based on transformer-based large language models, including the company’s Bard chatbot. But by mid-2024, the race to productize LLMs was in full swing, and Google wasn’t winning. That’s when the search giant decided to pay a reported $2.7 billion to license the Character.AI software and, most importantly, get Shazeer back at Google. He’s now a vice president at Google, and one of a very small group of people tasked with guiding the development and application of the company’s Gemini models.
Still, Google now faces some of the biggest challenges in its history. The arrival of AI in the internet search business (plus regulatory efforts in both the U.S. and EU) could seriously challenge the company’s dominance in search advertising.
But Shazeer expects a paradigm shift coming in AI, where Google’s experience in both internet search and AI research will only increase its relevance, and profitability. “Google has a culture of empowering every human with all the world’s information, creating trillions of dollars of value for the company and tens of trillions of dollars of value for the world,” he says.
“Replace ‘information’ with ‘intelligence’ and ‘trillions’ with ‘quadrillions,’ and this is my goal for Google’s future.”
This story is part of AI 20, our monthlong series of profiles spotlighting the most interesting technologists, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and creative thinkers shaping the world of artificial intelligence.
Login to add comment
Other posts in this group
After Pope Francis’s funeral was held over the weekend, attention has now turne
Shares of Deliveroo, the food delivery service based in London, are hitting three-year highs on Monday after it received a $3.6 billion
Social media users have been having a field day with Waymo’s autonomou
If you’re not on TikTok, you may not have heard of Aaron Parnas. But for many young people across the U.S., he’s a prominent political news source, with over 3.5 million followers on TikTok and ju
Getting a sense of the scale of social media platforms can be tricky. While tech companies often share self-serving metrics—like monthly active users or how likely users are to buy products after
Fun fact: The saying “work smarter, not harder” is coming up on its 100th birthday. Coined
