Finding a good employee can be difficult, and top companies are willing to pay top dollar for someone who can do a great job. Google, however, has taken that to a whole new level.

Sort of.

Noam Shazeer is an AI expert who worked for Google for 21 years before leaving in 2021 to start a company called Character.AI, which is a fun platform that allows people to interact with various characters.

For example, you could have the system ‘role play’ as Abraham Lincoln or another historical figure to have a conversation with them.

Google spent $2.7 billion to make a deal to license the technology Character.AI, part of which meant that Shazeer would come back to Google. In fact, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal:

“Shazeer’s return is widely viewed as the primary reason why Google made this deal.”

Shazeer has an impressive history with artificial intelligence technology. In fact, he is widely considered to be one of the pioneers of modern large language models, which are used to power most AI systems, including Chat GPT.

Part of the reason he left in 2021 was because Google refused to release a chatbot that he helped to develop called Meena. Google said that it wasn’t ready due to safety concerns, though this is likely a decision they regret.

About a year after they could have released Meena, Open AI released ChatGPT, which quickly brought AI technology mainstream.

Whether this massive investment to get him back into the Google family is worth it or not is certainly up for debate. While AI technology is very impressive, it hasn’t yet turned into a huge money maker for companies.

It is still early though, so major tech giants want to make sure they are positioned well to take advantage of whatever the market demands from artificial intelligence.

It is hard to believe any one person is worth that much.

If you enjoyed that story, check out what happened when a guy gave ChatGPT $100 to make as money as possible, and it turned out exactly how you would expect.