No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Your AI Friends Have Awoken, With Noam Shazeer

Apr 13, 2023

Noam Shazeer, Co-founder and CEO of Character AI and AI pioneer from Google, dives into the fascinating world of personalized AI bots. He discusses his groundbreaking work on the Transformer architecture and its role in modern AI. Noam reveals how users can engage with customized bots that embody various personalities, from famous figures to fictional characters. He also touches on user engagement strategies and the ethical considerations in launching advanced AI systems, hinting at a promising future for AI interaction.

30:20

Creator website

Episode guests

Noam Shazeer

Highlights

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Explanation of the last letter in ChatGPT: Transformer Based Model

02:17

The Viral Sensation and Renaming of Google's Internal Chatbot Pre-GPT

00:26

Intro

2min

The Evolution of AI and Language Processing

14min

Customizable AI Personas

5min

Exploring User Engagement and Future Monetization Strategies

3min

Navigating AI's Ethical Landscape

7min

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 Links:

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

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