Google paid $2.7B to rehire AI genius who left after company refused to release his bot: report

Google paid $2.7 billion to rehire an artificial intelligence genius who left the tech giant in a huff three years ago to found his own startup, according to a report.Noam Shazeer, a 48-year-old software engineer who was first hired by Google as one of its first few hundred employees back in 2000, left the company in 2021 after it refused his request to release a chat bot that he had developed with a colleague, Daniel De Freitas.Shazeer and De Freitas went on to found Character.AI, which grew to become one ...