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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.