[GLOBAL ECONOMIC TIMES]  The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on the 25th (local time) that Google invested an astronomical amount of money, well over 3 trillion won, to re-recruit former employees who were considered top artificial intelligence (AI) talents.

According to anonymous sources, in order to re-recruit Noam Shazir, who left Google in 2021 and founded the AI ​​startup 'Character.AI', Google will invest $2.7 billion (approximately 3.6 trillion won) with Character.AI, which was struggling due to lack of development costs. ) A large contract was signed. Although the purpose of the contract was to secure a technology license, the main purpose of the contract was to allow Shazir to return to work at Google, the source explained.

WSJ reported that even within Google, Shazir's return to Google is being accepted as the reason for this multi-billion dollar 'licensing deal'. It is reported that Shazir earned hundreds of millions of dollars through this contract. This is a very unusual amount for a license contract received by a founder who did not sell or list the company. Shazir has already returned to Google with the title of Vice President and is one of three people leading the next-generation version of the AI ​​model Gemini.

Shazir is a person known as a genius in the AI ​​field. In 2015, Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Google, praised Shazir as a talent capable of building AI with human-level intelligence in a lecture.

Shazir, who joined Google in 2000, co-published a major paper that became the foundation of generative AI technology while working at Google in 2017. Afterwards, Shazir developed a chatbot named ‘Meena’ with his Google colleague Daniel De Freitas. This chatbot is capable of exchanging jokes with users on a variety of topics, and internal expectations were high that it would replace Google's existing search engine service and lead to trillions of dollars in sales.

However, when Google did not release the chatbot for reasons such as safety and fairness, Shazir and de Freitas left Google in 2021 and founded Character.AI. Afterwards, Shazir publicly stated that Google had become too risk-averse in AI development in the past.

A year later, in 2022, OpenAI took the industry by storm with the release of ChatGPT. Google developed an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT first, but delayed its release for safety reasons and gave the lead to Microsoft (MS). came under criticism.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who played a key role in recruiting Shazir, said at a recent conference, "Google was previously too passive in using AI applications, but is now developing and releasing them as quickly as possible," and said of Shazir's return, "It's amazing." he said.

Google is not the first to recruit key talent through technology licensing agreements with small startups. Microsoft and Amazon also conducted similar deals this year, allowing them to recruit AI talent without requiring approval from regulators. However, there is also criticism that Silicon Valley's big tech companies are spending excessively on AI development competition.