No Priors Ep. 12 | With Noam Shazeer

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. 00:00 - Introduction 01:50 - Noam’s early AI projects at Google 07:13 - 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