Google appoints former Character.AI founder as co-lead of its AI models 

Google has appointed former Google researcher and author of the pioneering research paper Transfomers, Noam Shazeer as its co-lead of AI models.

Google has appointed Noam Shazeer, the former head of startup Character.AI and before that a long-time Google researcher, to co-lead its main AI project.

Shazeer will serve as a technical lead on Gemini, joining the other co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, the company said in a memo to staff.

Gemini is the line of AI models being developed by DeepMind, Google's AI division, and which are being integrated into products such as Search and Pixel smartphones.

(For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today’s Cache)

Shazeer recently rejoined Google from the chatbot maker he founded in 2021 with the U.S. tech giant paying billions to bring him and a handful of other employees into DeepMind and to strike a licensing agreement with Character.AI.

"We are thrilled to join the best team on earth building the most valuable technology on earth," Shazeer wrote in an email reply to the memo which was seen by Reuters.

The memo was first reported by The Information.