Noam Shazeer joined Google in 2000. One of his first major achievements was improving the spelling corrector of Google's search engine.[1] In 2017, Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need",[2][3][1] which introduced the transformer architecture.
At Google, Shazeer and his colleague Daniel de Freitas built a chatbot named Meena.[1] Following the refusal of Google to release the chatbot to the public, Shazeer and Freitas left the company in 2021 to found Character.AI.[1][4]
In August 2024, it was reported that Shazeer would be returning to Google to co-lead the Gemini AI project.[5] Shazeer was appointed as technical lead on Gemini, along with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals.[6] It was part of a $2.7 billion deal for Google to license Character's technology.[1][7]
^Chen, Mia Xu; Firat, Orhan; Bapna, Ankur; Johnson, Melvin; Macherey, Wolfgang; Foster, George; Jones, Llion; Schuster, Mike; Shazeer, Noam; Parmar, Niki; Vaswani, Ashish; Uszkoreit, Jakob; Kaiser, Lukasz; Chen, Zhifeng; Wu, Yonghui (2018). "The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Recent Advances in Neural Machine Translation". Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics: 76–86. arXiv:1804.09849. doi:10.18653/v1/p18-1008.
