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Google has rehired longtime researcher Noam Shazier in a $2.7 billion deal to lead the company's artificial intelligence models, the Wall Street Journal reports. Shazier left Google in 2021 after 21 years at Google. He reportedly left the company after the company refused to implement a chatbot for him and a colleague. He was still the leader of this character. His love co-authored the groundbreaking 2017 research paper that fueled the current artificial intelligence boom. Character.AI leverages breakthrough technological advances in this article. The company has raised $193 million and was valued at $1 billion by venture capitalists last year. Character.AI was valued at $1 billion last year. According to the report, Google paid Character.AI $2.7 billion to transfer the technology and bring Shazeer back to Google. The boom in artificial intelligence is prompting startups to release new features for chatbots, while rivals like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft-backed Anthropic are trying to gain market share by attracting new users.

Last year, Google was in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI but decided to back it. The partnership follows similar moves by Amazon and Microsoft to attract top talent from AI startups and comes at a time when the tech giants face regulatory scrutiny. Shazeer is the technical lead of Gemini, Google's AI chatbot, along with fellow executives Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinales. Gemini is a collection of artificial intelligence models developed by Google's AI division DeepMind and integrated into products such as Search and Pixel smartphones.