Noam Shazeer


Noam Shazeer is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur known for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and deep learning, particularly in the development of transformer models and natural language processing.

Career

Noam Shazeer joined Google in 2000. One of his first major achievements was improving the spelling corrector of Google's search engine. In 2017, Shazeer was one of the lead authors of the seminal paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture.
At Google, Shazeer and his colleague Daniel de Freitas built a chatbot named Meena. Following the refusal of Google to release the chatbot to the public, Shazeer and Freitas left the company in 2021 to found Character.AI.
In 2023 Time magazine chose Shazeer as one of the 100 most influential people in the AI world.
In August 2024, it was reported that Shazeer would be returning to Google to co-lead the Gemini AI project. Shazeer was appointed as technical lead on Gemini, along with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals. It was part of a $2.7 billion deal for Google to license Character's technology. Since he owns 30-40% of the company, it is estimated he netted $750 million-$1 billion.

Views

Shazeer said about artificial general intelligence that he doesn't "particularly care about AGI in the sense of wanting something that can do absolutely everything a person can do”. When asked in 2023 if he is afraid that AGI will destroy the world, he said: "No. Not yet. We’re going to work on it as the technology improves".
When asked why do large language models work he answered: "My best guess is divine benevolence Nobody really understands what’s going on. This is a very experimental science It’s more like alchemy or whatever chemistry was in the Middle Ages.”
Shazeer has stated, "I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender... I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children."

Personal life

Shazeer is an orthodox Jew. His grandparents escaped the Holocaust into the Soviet Union and later lived some time in Israel before emigrating to the USA. His father, Dov Shazeer, was a math teacher who became an engineer and his mother was a homemaker. His sister was ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew College. Noam was born in Philadelphia, attended grade school at Cohen Hillel Academy in Marblehead, MA and attended Swampscott High School in Swampscott, MA. He won a gold medal with perfect score at International Mathematical Olympiad 1994 as a member of the USA team. He went on to study math and computer science at Duke University in the years 1994-1998. In Duke he got a math scholarship and, as part of the Duke math team, won prizes in several math tournaments. He started studying in a graduate program in Berkeley but did not finish it. He is a father of three and is married to Yael Shacham Shazeer, who also works at Google. He lives in Palo Alto, California.