Co-founder of Character.AI. Returned to Google in 2024 in a major talent deal. Pioneer of transformer architecture improvements including multi-query attention and mixture-of-experts, and a co-author of the original Transformer paper.
Shazeer may be the most underrated person in AI. His efficiency innovations — mixture-of-experts, multi-query attention — are running inside virtually every frontier model, and his return to Google via the Character.AI deal was effectively an admission that letting him leave was one of Google's costliest talent mistakes. He doesn't do podcasts or keynotes, but his technical fingerprints are on more of what actually makes modern LLMs work than almost anyone else's. Google paid a billion-dollar premium to undo a retention failure.
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