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- Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer, a former Googler who worked in AI, spoke to the "No Priors" podcast.
- He said Google was afraid to launch a chatbot, fearing consequences of it saying something wrong.
- Shazeer left to start Character.AI, a startup that builds chatbots that can imitate famous people.
Google hesitated for years to release a chatbot out of fear of the repercussions should it say something wrong, according to Noam Shazeer, a former Google Brain engineer and a key figure in the development of its large language-AI technology.
Shazeer, now the CEO of Character.ai, recently spoke to the "No Priors" podcast about his new startup, one of the hottest companies in generative AI. The startup has amassed nearly $200 million in funding to enable users to converse with virtual "characters" that can mimic a variety of personalities, including Elon Musk, a psychologist, and a life coach.
Like ChatGPT, Character.ai is a chatbot that uses a vast amount of text-based information from the web. OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT late last year set the internet ablaze and created renewed interest in generative AI. Microsoft has invested billions into OpenAI and began integrating its technology into Bing so that users can ask questions and get detailed responses directly within search. Google quickly responded with Bard.
The search giant didn't have to find itself in this defensive position, Shazeer said, telling the podcast that Google had much of the technology ready to go years prior. Shazeer was a lead author on Google's Transformer paper, which has been widely cited as key to today's chatbots. He cofounded Character.ai with Daniel De Freitas, the startup's president who also came from Google Brain.
De Freitas had been on a "lifelong mission" to make intelligent chatbots a reality, and he initially joined Google in 2016 after reading some of its research papers on language technology, Shazeer said. De Freitas saw the potential to use the company's large language research to build a chatbot.
"He did not get a lot of headcount. He started the thing as a 20% project," Shazeer said, referring to Google's historical program that allowed employees to spend part of their time working on side projects. "Then he just recruited an army of 20% helpers who were ignoring their day jobs and just helping him with this system."
Eventually, De Freitas created Meena, a chatbot that was publicly demoed in 2020 and later renamed LaMDA.
"He built something really cool that actually worked, while other people were building systems that were just failing," Shazeer said.
Despite De Freitas' enthusiasm and support from other staff, Shazeer says that Google didn't believe that a chatbot would gain enough traction to justify any reputational risk.
"I think it was just a matter of large companies having concerns about launching projects that can say anything, how much you're risking versus how much you have to gain from it," Shazeer said when asked why Google didn't release a chatbot sooner.
LaMDA was the subject of some controversy last year after Blake Lemoine, an engineer, claimed that the bot was sentient and therefore deserved human rights. He was ultimately fired by the company. Google had also received internal pushback from AI researchers like Timnit Gebru, who cautioned against releasing anything that might cause harm. Google has invested significant time in training Bard to provide approved responses.
Concerns about chatbots are not unfounded. They can respond to questions with inaccurate answers and produce biased answers. Publishers and other copyright holders fear Google and Microsoft could drive traffic away from their websites by using their own data to return information directly within search results. And consumers have been using chatbots to have conversations of a sexual nature, something Character.ai explicitly prohibits.
Bloomberg reported that Google has let much of its ethical concern fall by the wayside this year as it fears the potential of the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership to steal away search market share. Samsung is considering switching the default search engine to Bing on its smartphones, The New York Times reported.