Big Tech is busy wrapping up AI talent to dominate the market
Big Tech is following a crafty playbook to hoover up AI talent: Instead of buying the hottest AI startups, the giants hire their leadership and license their intellectual property, essentially sucking the life out of them. So long as they leave behind the shell of a company, antitrust scrutiny can be avoided. Alphabet’s Google [which just had bad news in the form of a court ruling against it for its search market monopoly], is the latest to follow this template by hiring the co-founders of Character.ai, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, along with a few other employees.
Most of the startup’s staff will remain with the smaller company while its general counsel will become CEO. Why a lawyer? Because Google is entering a licensing agreement to use Character.AI’s technology—in addition to buying out the startup’s investors, principally Andreessen Horowitz, who’d put in more $150 million. Microsoft last year hired the founding team behind Inflection, a high-flying startup that was also creating an AI companion.
Amazon.com then hired the team at Adept, a San Francisco-based firm co-founded by former OpenAI and Google researchers. It’s a sleight of hand that reaps big benefits for tech giants, who can afford the vast computational power and data needed to build Generative AI, but struggle to attract the best talent. Now they can do the latter too.
Shazeer is a big hire for Google, which has grappled with glitches in its flagship AI model Gemini that could hinder its efforts to catch up to Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud wars. So venerated is Shazeer that Google may be paying him in the tens of millions of dollars (or more) to rejoin the company. He was one of the lead inventors of the Transformer, a powerful blueprint for
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