Noam Shazeer played a key role in developing key foundations of modern AI - including co-inventing Transformers at Google, as well as pioneering AI chat pre-chatGPT. These are the foundations supporting today’s AI revolution. On this episode of No Priors, Noam discusses his work as an AI researcher, engineer, inventor, and now CEO.

Noam Shazeer is currently the CEO and Co-founder of Character AI, a service that allows users to design and interact with their own personal bots that take on the personalities of well-known individuals or archetypes. You could have a socratic conversation with Socrates. You could pretend you’re being interviewed by Oprah. Or you could work through a life decision with a therapist bot. Character recently raised $150M from A16Z, Elad Gil, and others. Noam talks about his early AI adventures at Google, why he started Character, and what he sees on the horizon of AI development.

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Show Notes:

[1:50] - Noam’s early AI projects at Google

[7:13] - Noam’s focus on language models and AI applications

[11:13] - Character’s co-founder Daniel de Freitas Adiwardana work on Google’s Lambda

[13:53] - The origin story of Character.AI

[18:47] - How AI can express emotions

[26:51] - What Noam looks for in new hires

Episode 3062 CWSA 01/04/26

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