Who is Noam Shazeer? AI leader Google paid $2.7 billion to hire, now sparking internal tensions

Google made headlines in late 2024 when it re-hired Noam Shazeer via a licensing deal with Character.AI. Shazeer who was an early Google employee, went on to work for Google DeepMind division and is said to have started working on development of Gemini.

However, if a new report by The Information is to be believed, Shazeer has helped meaningfully shape Gemini since his return to Google but some of his statements have angered his colleagues and prompted Google to censor him.

The matter came to a fore after one of the comments made by Shazeer in one of company's internal discussion forums about how Google employees could support their transgender and binary colleagues.

​“I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender,” Shazeer wrote in a post quoted by the publication

“I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them.” he added

xAI owner Elon Musk, who has been known to voice his opinions against what he considers ‘woke mind virus’, also came out in support for Shazeer in a post on X. He wrote, “Noam is right”

During his stint at Google, Shazeer and his colleagues built a chatbot called Meena and after the company's refusal to release it to the public, he left the tech giant.

He went on to start Character.AI in 2021, an AI startup that allows users to chat with an AI avatar of famous real and fictional characters.

After ChatGPT changed the AI landscape in 2022, Google also went full throttle with its AI efforts, releasing the Bard chatbot, which was later renamed as Gemini. Amid the ongoing AI race, Google struck a licensing deal with Character.AI which saw the AI startup's co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas along with a few members of its research team joining the tech giant.