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

By Kenrick Cai

SAN FRANCISCO - 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.

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.