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, later worked for the Google DeepMind division and is said to have started working on the 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 the fore after one of the comments made by Shazeer in…