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 2023 Time magazine chose Shazeer as one of the 100 most influential people in the AI world.[5]
In August 2024, it was reported that Shazeer would be returning to Google to co-lead the Gemini AI project.[6] Shazeer was appointed as technical lead on Gemini, along with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals.[7] It was part of a $2.7 billion deal for Google to license Character's technology.[1][8] Since he owns 30-40% of the company, it is estimated he netted $750 million-$1 billion.[8]
Views
Shazeer said about artificial general intelligence that he doesn't "particularly care about AGI in the sense of wanting something that can do absolutely everything a person can do”.[9] When asked in 2023 if he is afraid that AGI will destroy the world, he said: "No. Not yet. [...] We’re going to work on it as the technology improves".[10]
When asked why do large language models work he answered: "My best guess is divine benevolence [...] Nobody really understands what’s going on. This is a very experimental science [...] It’s more like alchemy or whatever chemistry was in the Middle Ages.”[9]
Personal life
Shazeer is an orthodox Jew.[11][12][13] His grandparents escaped the Holocaust into the Soviet Union and later lived some time in Israel before emigrating to the USA.[11] His father, Dov Shazeer, was a math teacher who became an engineer[11] and his mother was a homemaker.[12] His sister was ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew College.[11] Noam was born in Philadelphia and studied math and computer science at Duke University[11] in the years 1994-1998.[12] In Duke he got a math scholarship[10] and, as part of Duke team, won prizes in several math tournaments.[11][14][15] He started studying in a graduate program in Berkeley but did not finish it.[11] He is married to Yael Shacham Shazeer, who also works in Google, and father of three.[11] He lives in Palo Alto, California.[11]
↑ 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.
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