Who is Noam Shazeer: In late 2024, when Google re-engaged its former employee Noam Shazeer through a licensing deal with Character.AI, the news spread across the tech industry around the world. Shazir was one of Google’s early engineers who later worked at Google DeepMind and played a key role in the early development of the Gemini project. According to reports, he has had a deep impact on the direction and technical structure of Gemini after his return.
But now a new report has come out according to which some controversial statements of Shazeer have created dissatisfaction within Google. The company has also taken action against some of his comments and they have been censored on internal forums.
Statement became cause of controversy
The matter came to light when Shazeer expressed his opinion on support for transgender and non-binary employees on an internal forum of the company. He wrote, “I do not believe that humans have any fixed characteristics like ‘gender’. Nor do I believe that God sends someone in the wrong body. Making children infertile is also not right. Everyone has the right to their beliefs but I do not agree with these beliefs.”
After his statement, many Google employees got angry. Meanwhile, Elon Musk supported his opinion on X (formerly Twitter) and wrote, “Noam is right.” Musk has openly expressed his opinion against the ‘woke mind virus’ before, so his support was not surprising.
Noam Shazir’s technology journey
Noam Shazier joined Google in 2000 and became one of the company’s early technology pillars. He was part of the team that pioneered the Google Brain project and co-authored the famous paper Attention Is All You Need. This paper gave rise to the Transformer Model, the same technology that laid the foundation for today’s Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
While at Google, Shazeer and his team created a chatbot named Meena, but when the company did not make it public, he left Google in 2021. After this he founded a startup called Character.AI which allows users to chat with AI avatars of famous characters.
Return and new controversies in Google again
When there was a stir in the world of AI after the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022, Google also increased its pace and launched Bard (now Gemini). Meanwhile, Google made a big deal with Character.AI under which Noam Shazir, Daniel De Freitas and many members of their research team rejoined Google.
However, now that some of Shazir’s personal opinions have increased tensions within the company, questions are being raised about whether the line between AI innovation and personal opinion is becoming blurred within Google.
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