Google appoints former Character.AI founder as co-lead of its AI models

Google has appointed Noam Shazeer, the former head of startup Character.AI and before that a long-time Google researcher, to co-lead its main AI project.

Shazeer will serve as a technical lead on Gemini, joining the other co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, the company said in a memo to staff. Gemini is the line of AI models being developed by DeepMind, Google’s AI division, and which are being integrated into products such as Search and Pixel smartphones.