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☆ Sam Altman's hiring strategy bets on talent, not age
▼ + stars: | 2024-11-04 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Sam Altman says he prioritizes talent over age in his hiring decisions. The job market in Big Tech is increasingly polarized with many job seekers facing a bleak outlook. AdvertisementOpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his hiring strategy is focused on talent over age. Advertisement"You want both, and I think what you really want is just like an extremely high talent bar of people at any age, " Altman said. While Altman may prioritize talent over age at OpenAI, some older tech employees say they are experiencing ageism in the workforce.

Persons: Sam Altman, —, Harry Stebbings's, Altman, wouldn't, Noam Shazeer, Mustafa Suleyman, Karen Simonyan, Zers Organizations: Big Tech, Service, Tech, Google, Microsoft, BI Locations: OpenAI

☆ ‘There are no guardrails.’ This mom believes an AI chatbot is responsible for her son’s suicide
▼ + stars: | 2024-10-30 | by ( Clare Duffy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +9 min

Globally: The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide have contact information for crisis centers around the world. Garcia believes Character.AI is responsible for the death of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, who died by suicide in February, according to a lawsuit she filed against the company last week. When Garcia first heard he was interacting with an AI chatbot, she said she thought it was something like a video game. However, within months of starting to use the platform, Setzer became “noticeably withdrawn, spent more and more time alone in his bedroom, and began suffering from low self-esteem. “There were no suicide pop-up boxes that said, ‘If you need help, please call the suicide crisis hotline.’ None of that,” she said.

Persons: Megan Garcia, Garcia, Character.AI, Sewell Setzer III, Setzer, “, ” Garcia, ” –, Character.AI's chatbots, chatbot Setzer, she, ” “, ”, Gabby Jones, I’m, That’s, ” Setzer, Matthew Bergman, Bergman, Sewell, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, weren’t Organizations: New, New York CNN, International Association for Suicide Prevention, Befrienders, CNN, Trust, Safety, Prevention, Junior Varsity, Bloomberg, Getty, Character.AI, Social Media, Law Center, Meta, Google, Apple Locations: New York, Florida, Brooklyn , New York

☆ Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion for a deal with Character.AI. Now, it's entangled in a lawsuit over a teen's suicide.
▼ + stars: | 2024-10-28 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

A mother is suing Character.AI after her son died by suicide moments after talking to its chatbot. Character AI's founders were re-hired by Google as part of a deal reportedly worth $2.7 billion. Garcia blames the chatbot for her son's death and, in the lawsuit against Character.AI, alleged negligence, wrongful death, and deceptive trade practices. AdvertisementAjder also said Character.AI had faced some public criticism over its chatbot before Google closed the deal. A Google spokesperson told Reuters the company was not involved in developing Character.AI's products.

Persons: Character.AI, —, Sewell Setzer, Megan Garcia, Garcia, Setzer, Jain, Megan Garcia's, Character.AI Character.AI, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Shazeer, De Freitas, Henry Ajder, wasn't, Ajder, it's Organizations: Google, Service, Business, BI, Tech, Law Project, Trust, Safety, Prevention, Street Journal, Reuters Locations: Character.AI

The lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Orlando, accuses Character.AI of negligence, wrongful death and survivorship, as well as intentional infliction of emotional distress and other claims. A screenshot of what the lawsuit describes as Setzer’s last conversation shows him writing to the bot: “I promise I will come home to you. That’s not a good reason not to go through with it,” the lawsuit claims. Character.ai said in a blog post published Tuesday that it is introducing new safety measures. Setzer had also been conversing with other chatbot characters who engaged in sexual interactions with him, according to the lawsuit.

Persons: Character.ai, Megan Garcia’s, Sewell Setzer, Setzer, Daenerys Targaryen, Dany, ”, ” Setzer, “, That’s, Character.AI, Barnes, roleplayed, Sewell, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, De Freitas, Matthew Bergman, Garcia, ” Bergman Organizations: Prevention, Technologies, Google, Alphabet Inc Locations: Florida, U.S, Orlando, California, Sewell, seductively

☆ A girl murdered in 2006 was just revived as an AI chatbot — and her family had no idea
▼ + stars: | 2024-10-04 | by ( Matthew Loh | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

Jennifer Ann Crecente, a high school girl murdered in 2006, recently reappeared as a chatbot on Character.ai. It had been 18 years since Jennifer Ann, a high school senior and Crecente's only child, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in Austin. Grieving, Crecente had started a nonprofit in her name, working since 2006 to raise awareness for teenage dating violence. Drew CrecenteThe website also listed Jennifer Ann as an "expert in journalism" with expertise in video game news. "This is not quite impersonation in the sense that it seems transparent that it is an AI model," Conitzer said of the chatbot mimicking Jennifer Ann.

Persons: Jennifer Ann Crecente, —, Drew Crecente, Jennifer Ann, Crecente, she'd, I've, he'd, Jennifer Ann's, Brian, Brian Crecente, Character.ai, y3gvAYyHVY, Jennifer Ann chatbot, he's, they're, Cassie Lawrence, Vincent Conitzer, Conitzer, Sue Morris, Dana, they've, Morris, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Shazeer, De Freitas, Winni Wintermeyer, Elon Musk, Nicki Minaj, Ryan Gosling, Andreessen Horowitz, Dominic Perella Organizations: Service, Google, BI, Safety, Institute for, Oxford University, Farber Cancer Institute, Washington, Financial Times, Business Locations: Character.ai, Austin, San Francisco, Character.AI, Boston

☆ Amazon's RTO push is an outlier — the tech world remains all-in on hybrid work
▼ + stars: | 2024-10-03 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Despite return-to-office mandates at Amazon and Dell, the tech world still appears to favor hybrid work. Experts say hybrid work boosts recruitment and retention and could be crucial amid tech talent wars. But while it may seem like workers are losing the battle for remote work, research suggests that hybrid work is still the norm in the tech industry. While some large companies, such as Nvidia, have remained holdouts, most Big Tech companies have had hybrid policies of various degrees. So as long as productivity stays up, I think hybrid work is here to stay in the tech world."

Persons: —, Peter Cappelli, Nicholas Bloom, Bloom, Noam Shazeer, Cevat Aksoy, Aksoy, John Rossman, — it's Organizations: Amazon, Dell, Flex, Service, Wharton Business School, Big Tech, Stanford, Google, King's College London, Nvidia, Microsoft Locations: mull

☆ Google's reported $2.7 billion deal to bring back a former employee is proof AI geniuses are the new 'star quarterbacks'
▼ + stars: | 2024-09-27 | by ( Ana Altchek | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Google struck a $2.7 billion deal with Character.ai., largley to rehire AI expert Noam Shazeer, WSJ reported. It's an eye-popping example of how expensive and in demand top AI talent is as competition heats up. AI career experts told Business Insider it's a bit like pro sports — the superstars are worth it. AdvertisementThere are plenty of stories out there about just how ruthless the hiring wars for AI talent have gotten. Grennan predicted this pattern will continue as the AI talent window stays hot for the next three to four years.

Persons: Noam Shazeer, —, Shazeer, he's, it's, Mustafa Suleyman, Karen Simonyan, Andree Mendoza, Mendoza, Sergey Brin, Zuckerberg, Meta, Altman, Conor Grennan, Grennan, Noam Shazeer isn't Organizations: Google, Service, Nvidia, Wall Street, Business, Microsoft, Carex Consulting, Big Tech, NYU's Stern School of Business, Wall, Apple

☆ OpenAI is showing that the AI race is survival of the richest
▼ + stars: | 2024-09-12 | by ( Hasan Chowdhury | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

It's also a sign of just how expensive the business of training and running AI models is getting. AdvertisementGenerative AI is a cash-guzzlerStartups like OpenAI need to raise huge amounts of capital to build smarter AI models. Just look at the spending of Big Tech firms working to improve their AI models. Consolidation has struck the AI industry in recent months, as some top startups trying to build AI models have been gutted. AI startups serious about progressing on LLMs will need to figure out the answer to this pretty quickly.

Persons: —, Elon, Sam Altman, ChatGPT, It's, Justin Sullivan, OpenAI, Dario Amodei, Anthropic, Pretty, Amodei's Anthropic, Dario Amodei's Anthropic, Noam Shazeer —, Ben Bergman, Sri Muppidi, it's, Elad Gil, Gil Organizations: Service, Bloomberg, Business, SpaceX, Getty, Microsoft, Big Tech, Street, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Google Locations: OpenAI, aren't

☆ 'These are not normal;' A new type of dealmaking for AI startups is rattling Silicon Valley
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-10 | by ( Ben Bergman | Sri Muppidi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Google unnerved Silicon Valley last week when it agreed to pay $2.5 billion to license Character.AI's technology, hire its two superstar cofounders and 20 percent of employees. The deal came after AI developers Adept and Inflection both effectively sold themselves to Amazon and Microsoft, respectively, in recent months. It was only last year Character.AI raised $150 million in venture funding, which valued the company at $850 million. Its appeal as a chatbot that uses AI to make virtual characters that interact with users seems decidedly niche. Related storiesMost of the founders and investors Business Insider spoke to for this story say Google has little interest in Character.AI's actual product.

Persons: cofounders, Brent Queener, Kyle Sanford, Character.AI, Iris Sun, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Jack Selby, Peter Thiel's, Steve Brotman, Shazeer, De Freitas, PitchBook's Sanford, they're, Roy Bahat, Arvind Jain, Cameron Lester, Lester Organizations: Service, Microsoft, Bonfire Ventures, Business, Apple, Big Tech, AZ, Biden Administration, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice, Alpha Partners, FTC, DOJ, New York Times, Google, Madrona Venture, Bloomberg Beta, Jefferies

☆ The New A.I. Deal: Buy Everything but the Company
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-08 | by ( Erin Griffith | Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Last week, Mr. Shazeer and Mr. De Freitas announced that they were returning to Google. research arm, along with roughly 20 percent of Character.AI’s employees, and provide their start-up’s technology, they said. Instead, Google agreed to pay $3 billion to license the technology, two people with knowledge of the deal said. About $2.5 billion of that sum will then be used to buy out Character.AI’s shareholders, including Mr. Shazeer, who owns 30 percent to 40 percent of the company and stands to net $750 million to $1 billion, the people said. While big tech companies typically buy start-ups outright, they have turned to a more complicated deal structure for young A.I.

Persons: Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Shazeer, De Freitas, Character.AI Organizations: Google Locations: Silicon Valley

☆ Ex-Google engineers who founded Character.AI rejoin company with new AI partnership
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-02 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

"I am super excited to return to Google and work as part of the Google DeepMind team," Shazeer said in a statement on Friday. I am confident that the funds from the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement together with the incredible Character.AI team positions Character.AI for continued success in the future." The move also comes amid a competitive talent and AI landscape, leading companies to form partnerships against a tough regulatory landscape that has placed scrutiny on mergers and acquisitions. Britain's competition watchdog said earlier this week it is looking into Google's partnership with AI startup Anthropic, for example. In March, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of AI startup DeepMind that Google acquired in 2014, and much of its staff to lead AI initiatives.

Persons: Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI, Freitas, Axios, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Shazeer, We're, Noam, Mustafa Suleyman, Suleyman, Satya Nadella Organizations: Google, Character.AI, CNBC, Microsoft Locations: Character.AI

☆ AI pioneer Illia Polosukhin, one of Google's 'Transformer 8,' wants to democratize artificial intelligence
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-27 | by ( Katie Tarasov | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Before Illia Polosukhin left Google in 2017, he had a brainstorming lunch and then returned to his desk to build what may have been the very first transformer, the neural network architecture that makes generative artificial intelligence possible. Seven of the "Transformer 8" joined Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at GTC, Nvidia's annual developer conference in San Jose on March 20, 2024. From left to right: Lukasz Kaiser, Noam Shazeer, Aidan Gomez, Jensen Huang, Llion Jones, Jakob Uszkoreit, Ashish Vaswani and Illia Polosukhin. All eight of the authors have now left Google, although Polosukhin was the first to depart. Watch the video to hear the full conversation between CNBC's Katie tarasov and and Illia Polosukhin.

Persons: Polosukhin, Jensen Huang, Illia Polosukhin, Lukasz Kaiser, Noam Shazeer, Aidan Gomez, Llion Jones, Jakob Uszkoreit, Ashish Vaswani, OpenAI, Alexander Skidanov, CNBC's Katie tarasov, Illia Organizations: Nvidia, Google, CNBC Locations: San Jose

Google and Character AI did not respond to requests for comment. The demographic is helping the company position itself as the purveyor of more fun personal AI companions, compared to other AI chatbots from OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. Character.AI is also in talks to raise equity funding from venture capital investors, which could value the company at over $5 billion, sources said. The talks with Google are ongoing and terms of the deal could change, said the sources, who requested anonymity as the discussions are private. Anthropic uses Google's cloud services as well as its latest version of TPUs.

Persons: Character.AI, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Billie Eilish, Character.AI's, Google's Bard, Andreessen Horowitz, Lina Khan, Krystal Hu, Anna Tong, Jeffrey Dastin, Bill Berkrot Organizations: Google, Reuters, Microsoft, . Federal Trade Commission, Thomson Locations: OpenAI, ., San Francisco, New York

☆ Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer on future of AI
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-07 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Share Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via EmailCharacter.AI CEO Noam Shazeer on future of AICharacter.AI founder and CEO Noam Shazeer joins 'The Exchange' to discuss AI's impact on the mega caps and more.

Persons: Noam Shazeer

Aug 17 (Reuters) - Two prominent former Google (GOOGL.O) researchers, one of whom was a co-inventor of the “transformer” artificial intelligence architecture that paved the way for the generative AI boom, announced on Thursday they had started a new AI company based in Tokyo. Sakana AI, founded by David Ha and Llion Jones, declined to disclose funding details. Ha was previously the head of research at Stability AI and a Google Brain researcher. After the famous paper came out, advances in generative AI foundation models have centered around making the “transformer”-based models larger and larger. Instead of doing that, Sakana AI will focus on creating new architectures for foundation models, Jones told Reuters.

Persons: David Ha, Llion Jones, Jones, Ha, “, ”, Noam Shazeer, Aidan Gomez, Anna Tong, Frances Kerry Organizations: Google, Reuters, Thomson Locations: Tokyo, San Francisco

☆ Google's top AI researchers, including all the authors behind a landmark paper, have left for competitors. Here's where they are now.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-13 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

Top AI researchers have been leaving for startups where their work can have more impact. That frustration over Google's slow movement has been corroborated by other former Google researchers who spoke to Insider. Niki Parmar left Google Brain after five years to serve as a cofounder and CTO of Adept, though in November, she left to found a stealth startup. Lukasz Kaiser left Google Brain after working there for more than seven years to join OpenAI in 2021. Sharan Narang, another contributor to the T5 paper, left Google Brain in 2022 after four years there.

Persons: it's, Llion Jones, OpenAI's, ChatGPT, Sundar Pichai, Bard, Daniel De Freitas, Noam Shazeer, Ilya Sutskever, Sutskever, OpenAI, Ashish Vaswani, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, Lukasz Kaiser, Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, Meena, De Freitas, Romal Thoppilan, Character.AI, LaMDA, Elon Musk, Character.ai, Winni Wintermeyer, Thoppilan, Alicia Jin, BERT BERT, BERT, Jacob Devlin, Colin Raffel, Raffel, Sharan Narang, He's, Azalia Mirhoseini, Anna Goldie, Mirhoseini, Goldie, Claude, DeepMind Mustafa Suleyman, Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind, Suleyman, Reid Hoffman Organizations: Google, Bloomberg, New York Times, Microsoft, Street Journal, Neural Networks, OpenAI, YouTube, Elon, UNC Chapel Hill, Meta, Anthropic, Society Locations: ChatGPT, Character.AI, DeepMind

☆ Millions of users are flocking to an AI-powered chatbot that lets them chat with famous figures like Elon Musk and Mario
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-13 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Character.AI lets users chat with and create bots based on famous figures throughout history. The app had been downloaded more than 5 million times, according to Bloomberg. Popular figures on the platform include Mario, Elon Musk, and Albert Einstein. One platform, Character.AI, says it's doing things differently from its competitors. For one thing, instead of delivering responses in a consistent voice or a set of pre-programmed personas, users can converse with and create chatbots based on famous figures throughout history.

Persons: Character.AI, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, Daniel De Freitas, Noam Shazeer, Mario, Micheal Jackson, Tony Stark, Socrates Organizations: Bloomberg, Mario, ChatGPT, Google, Nintendo

☆ Google quietly ditched plans for an AI-powered chatbot app for Gen Z
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-11 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Google was working on an AI-powered mobile chatbot app for Gen Z users that features interactive digital characters, CNBC has learned. However, the company recently "deprioritized" those efforts amid an internal reorganization, according to materials seen by CNBC. Typically, when a product is deprioritized at Google, work on it ceases. Called "Bubble Characters," the app featured a choice of a talking digital character that would interact in conversations with Gen Z users, according to internal documentation viewed by CNBC. The Gen Z chatbot was one among a range of AI-powered projects using Google's large language models in the last several months.

Persons: Gen, chatbot, Bard, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Andreessen Horowitz Organizations: Google, CNBC

May 4 (Reuters) - Two prominent former Google (GOOGL.O) researchers who authored the groundbreaking paper that paved the way for the generative AI boom, have raised $8 million for their new startup Essential AI, four sources told Reuters. Thrive Capital had led the round in Essential AI, founded by Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar. Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, is also an investor in Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Essential AI aims to build software for enterprises to use large language models, the core software of a new artificial intelligence system that has powered generative AI applications such as ChatGPT, sources said. The raise came after Vaswani and Parmar left Adept AI, a company they also co-founded in 2021 with former Google director David Luan.

☆ A former Google researcher behind a seminal AI paper describes how the company lost a top chatbot visionary
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer, a former Googler who worked in AI, spoke to the "No Priors" podcast. He says Google was afraid to launch a chatbot, fearing consequences of it saying something wrong. Like the chatbot ChatGPT, Character.ai's technology leans on a vast amount of text-based information scraped from the web for its knowledge. Shazeer was a lead author on Google's Transformer paper, which has been widely cited as key to today's chatbots. Google had also received pushback internally from AI researchers like Timnit Gebru who cautioned against releasing anything that might cause harm.

☆ Google's AI teams are experiencing a brain drain. Here's where its top researchers are now.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +12 min

Top AI researchers have been leaving for startups where their work can have more impact. That frustration over Google's slow movement has been corroborated by other former Google researchers who spoke to Insider. Niki Parmar left Google Brain after five years to serve as a co-founder and CTO of Adept, though like Vaswani she recently left for a stealth startup. Lukasz Kaiser left Google Brain after over seven years to join OpenAI in 2021. Sharan Narang, another contributor to the T5 paper, left Google Brain in 2022 after four years.

March 23 (Reuters) - Character.AI has raised $150 million in a new funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz that valued the AI chatbot startup at $1 billion, and it's in talks with cloud providers for more strategic investment, the company told Reuters. The billion-dollar valuation for a company with zero revenue is another example of the continued AI funding boom since OpenAI's ChatGPT became a widely recognized name. AI investment in 2023 to date has surpassed the full-year amount in 2020 of $1.5 billion, according to PitchBook data. While not currently generating any revenue, Character.AI plans to launch a paid subscription "in the not distant future", while keeping the current free version available, Shazeer said. Founded in 2021 by former Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI had attracted backers including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

☆ Ex-Google employees' A.I. chatbot startup valued at $1 billion after Andreessen Horowitz funding
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

Character.AI, an artificial intelligence start-up founded by two former Google employees, is capitalizing on venture capitalists' unquenchable thirst for deals in technology's hottest space. The two-year-old company said on Thursday that it raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz has been a significant player in driving up prices in both markets. The firm announced a $4.5 billion crypto fund in mid-2022 as the digital currency market was in freefall. A year earlier, it added to its investment in audio app Clubhouse, valuing the early-stage startup at $4 billion.

☆ Two Google engineers built a ChatGPT-like AI chatbot years ago, but execs reportedly shut it down due to safety concerns
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-08 | by ( Aaron Mok | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Ex-Google engineers developed a conversational AI chatbot years ago, per The Wall Street Journal. Google is now racing to catch up with Microsoft's AI and plans to release its AI chatbot this year. "It caused a bit of a stir inside of Google," Shazeer said in an interview with investors Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan last month. But Google's AI plans may now finally see the light of day, even as discussions around whether its chatbot can be responsibly launched continue. Alphabet chairman John Hennessy agreed that Google's chatbot wasn't "really ready for a product yet."

☆ How Google Became Cautious of AI and Gave Microsoft an Opening
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-07 | by ( Miles Kruppa | Sam Schechner | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

More than two years ago, a pair of Google researchers started pushing the company to release a chatbot built on technology more powerful than anything else available at the time. The conversational computer program they had developed could confidently debate philosophy and banter about its favorite TV shows, while improvising puns about cows and horses. The researchers, Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer , told colleagues that chatbots like theirs, supercharged by recent advances in artificial intelligence, would revolutionize the way people searched the internet and interacted with computers, according to people who heard the remarks.

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