- The Wall Street Journal reported that Google has concluded a $2.7 billion deal with Character.ai to rehire artificial intelligence expert Noam Shazier.
- It’s a striking example of how expensive and in-demand the best AI talent is as competition heats up.
- It’s a bit like professional sports: the stars deserve it, AI experts told Business Insider.
There are plenty of stories about how brutal the hiring wars are for AI talent.
Perplexity’s CEO told earlier this year how he was rejected by a Meta engineer who told him to “come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs”, Nvidia’s highly sought-after chips needed to develop cutting-edge AI.
But rehiring an AI pioneer by Google may take the cake.
Google paid a staggering $2.7 billion for a deal that brought Character.ai founder Noam Shazier, 48, back into the fold, according to a recent report. a report By Wall Street Journal.
Now, not all of this went to Shazeer — Google didn’t officially acquire the company but paid to license the startup’s technology — but the AI engineer made hundreds of millions, the newspaper reported, citing a source familiar with the matter.
But the main play was convincing Shazier to work at Google again, according to the report, and now he’s helping lead the next iteration of Gemini AI. Google did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Although he is certainly one of the most prominent examples to date of the high price that technology companies are willing to pay for AI talent, Shazier is not your average AI engineer. He co-authored a famous paper with seven other Googlers in 2017 called “Attention is All You Need,” which helped launch the generative AI boom.
He then left Google in 2021 after more than two decades at the company when the tech giant refused to launch its own chatbot over concerns it might say the wrong thing.
But a lot can happen in three years. As competition in the field of artificial intelligence intensifies, technology companies are engaged in a fierce competition to develop the best. Similar to the deal concluded by Google, Microsoft previously paid Inflection $650 million in exchange for a licensing deal and poached its founders, Mustafa Suleiman and Karen Simonyan.
Andre Mendoza, a technical recruiter at talent firm Carex Consulting Group, told Business Insider that there will likely be more deals like this in the future. These strategic licensing agreements are “a smart way to attract top talent without jumping through all the hoops of a full acquisition,” Mendoza said.
Far from cutting huge checks, big tech companies are pulling in their CEOs and founders to help get the deal done — and Google co-founder Sergey Brin reportedly helped convince Shazier to step back. Zuckerberg personally wrote emails to Google DeepMind AI researchers in an attempt to recruit them, The Information reported. The report also stated that Meta offered jobs to candidates without interviewing them.
Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has used similar tactics, calling applicants to convince them to join the company. As of June, the maker of ChatGPT had hired at least 44 former Google employees.
AI geniuses are the new “mid-stars.”
While these major efforts and huge payments may seem a bit much, Conor Greenan“It’s money well spent,” the chief artificial intelligence engineer at New York University’s Stern School of Business told Business Insider. Greenan said the AI industry currently resembles professional sports more than a typical business model.
“Noam Shazier is not just an employee; he is a star quarterback. There are simply very few individuals like him in the world,” Greenan said, adding that few have the intellect and track record to successfully create a company like Character.ai.
The platform had about 20 million monthly active users, according to a Wall Street Journal report. It allows users to talk to fictional AI characters and AI celebrities.
The market for cutting-edge, specialized AI talent is small and only a few people have the combination of “deep technical expertise” within a large organization, said Mendoza, who also compared the AI industry to professional sports.
“A lot of experts are already working with big players or have launched their own startups,” Mendoza said.
Even if Google overpays, that’s the nature of the game — and companies like Google, Meta, Apple and OpenAI can afford it, Greenan said.
“And if just one of these talented individuals succeeds, it’s a product worth billions,” Greenan said.
Greenan expects this pattern to continue as the AI talent window remains hot over the next three to four years. But he expects it will eventually shrink significantly as AI becomes more capable and fewer people are needed to build it.