The author who made the greatest contribution to Transformer returns to Google as co-technical director of Gemini

Jin Lei from Aofei Temple
Quantum Bit | Public Account QbitAI

Served as Gemini’s co-technical director!

This is the latest move of Noam Shazeer , the author with the "greatest contribution" to Transformer , after returning to Google.

According to more revelations from The Information, Shazeer will work on the development of Gemini together with Google AI director Jeff Dean and DeepMind chief scientist Oriol Vinyals .

As Gemini is a project that directly competes with OpenAI's GPT model, with the return of the original author of Transformer, the battle has become more and more lively.

“Packed and recycled” by Google

In fact, before this revelation, Google had already made a "rich" acquisition earlier this month:

Take away the core team of the star AI unicorn Character.AI .

Among them are the two founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas.

The price offered by Google at the time was as high as US$2.5 billion (about RMB 17.9 billion), far higher than Character.AI's valuation of US$1 billion.

Although most of the Character.AI team stayed to continue building Character.AI products, netizens still found some highlights:

Isn't this just leaving a shell?

The relationship between Shazeer and Google can be traced back even further.

In 2021, Shazeer left Google and founded Character.AI with his colleague Freitas.

While at Google, they were primarily responsible for building LaMDA , a language model for conversational AI.

Shazeer is one of the eight authors of Transformer and is recognized as the "greatest contributor"——

Based on his own ideas, he rewrote the entire project code, brought the system to a new level, and made the Transformer project "kick off the sprint."

The main purpose of founding Character.AI is to further study more personalized super intelligence.

Now, after more than two years of development, Character.AI has accumulated more than 20 million users with its "various AI characters".

The founder's background and rapidly growing traffic attracted the attention of investors. In March 2023, Character.AI completed a $150 million financing round with a valuation of $1 billion, led by a16z, with participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, A Capital and SV Angel.

However, after that, this star AI unicorn began to run into trouble:

Four months after this round of financing, there were reports that Character.AI was negotiating a new round of financing, but there was no further news.

This year, Character.AI has been repeatedly reported to have difficulty in raising funds. On July 4, Character.AI was reported to be considering selling to Google and Meta.

And now, the results of Character.AI can be regarded as being sold to Google in disguise. After all, even the core team has been taken away.

AIGC’s “common problem”

If we think carefully about the results of Character.AI, we will find some common problems of AIGC startups:

That is burning money and lack of money .

It is not difficult to understand the spending of money. After all, the expensive computing power required to train large models is a headache for many companies, not to mention the fierce competition. All players are updating and iterating intensively.

The lack of money means that AIGC's product business is difficult to monetize .

Other apps that performed the same operation as Character.AI include Inflection , Adept , etc.

Microsoft paid money to obtain Inflection's technology license, and the founder of Inflection and most of its employees directly joined Microsoft to establish a new department.

Similarly, Amazon and Adept, a startup founded by another Transformer author, have similar operations and were investigated by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC): This is probably an attempt to circumvent antitrust investigations through technology licensing.

In addition, there are rumors that Stability AI, whose founders and core team have all run away, and Perplexity , the leader in AI search , are seeking acquisitions.

The latest news is that Perplexity announced:

The company plans to start running ads on its search app in the fourth quarter.

Perplexity has tweaked the way it displays information sources and launched a revenue-sharing model that allows publishers to earn money through the search engine.

Its advertising strategy will adopt a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model. According to people familiar with the matter, the price will be more than US$50 (approximately RMB 357). The initial advertising categories displayed include technology, health, and pharmaceuticals.

This also makes people sigh that even AI search still has the same profit model as traditional search and relies on advertising.

Reference links:
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/google-makes-former-character-ai-ceo-shazeer-a-co-leader-of-gemini-ai
[2] https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Google-allegedly-appoints-ex-CEO-of-Character.AI-as-Gemini-co-head/62609805
[3] https://x.com/erinkwoo/status/1826760171479334999

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