Noam Shazeer is back at Google, and this time he’s aiming for AGI

Noam Shazeer, one of the inventors of the transformer models that caused the current AI boom, is now leading the charge at Google toward artificial general intelligence (that is, AI that’s generally smarter than human beings). Initially, Google was less aggressive than its peers when it came to and releasing generative AI to the world. But the company finally appears to have caught up, and that its Gemini models are at the very front of the cutting edge in large language models.

Despite facing stiff competition from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, Shazeer says Google is in a strong position to emerge as the leader in large frontier models. Google is “recommitting to our core values,” he says. In practice, that means putting the user in control of the AI, and committing the personnel and resources required for breakthrough tech development.

“Google has the most brilliant group of researchers in the world, as well as excellent, good-hearted leaders whom I know, love and respect,” Shazeer says. “Google developed and owns much of the technology behind the LLM revolution; bringing it back to Google is the right thing to do.”

Shazeer actually left Google in 2021 to start his own transformer-based chatbot company, Character.AI. At the time of his exit, Shazeer criticized Google for being too cautious about releasing new products based on transformer-based large language models, including the company’s Bard chatbot. But by mid-2024, the race to productize LLMs was in full swing, and Google wasn’t winning. That’s when the search giant decided to pay a reported $2.7 billion to license the Character.AI software and, most importantly, get Shazeer back at Google. He’s now a vice president at Google, and one of a very small group of people tasked with guiding the development and application of the company’s Gemini models.

Still, Google now faces some of the biggest challenges in its history. The arrival of AI in the internet search business (plus regulatory efforts in both the U.S. and EU) could seriously challenge the company’s dominance in search advertising.

But Shazeer expects a paradigm shift coming in AI, where Google’s experience in both internet search and AI research will only increase its relevance, and profitability. “Google has a culture of empowering every human with all the world’s information, creating trillions of dollars of value for the company and tens of trillions of dollars of value for the world,” he says.

“Replace ‘information’ with ‘intelligence’ and ‘trillions’ with ‘quadrillions,’ and this is my goal for Google’s future.”

This story is part of AI 20, our monthlong series of profiles spotlighting the most interesting technologists, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and creative thinkers shaping the world of artificial intelligence.