No Priors Ep. 12 | With Noam Shazeer

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

April 25, 2023

Duration

35m

Channel

No Priors

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

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

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Elad Gil

  host

• Noam Shazeer

  guest

• Sarah Guo

  host

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of No Priors, featuring Elad Gil and Noam Shazeer, No Priors Ep. 12 | With Noam Shazeer explores transformer Pioneer Noam Shazeer Builds Emotional AI at Character.ai Noam Shazeer, co‑founder of Character.ai and co‑author of the Transformer paper, discusses his path from early Google AI work to building large language models and chat-based products. He explains why transformers overtook RNNs, emphasizes that language modeling is an “AI-complete” problem, and argues that scaling models, data, and compute still shows no clear saturation point. Shazeer details the origins of Google’s LaMDA (formerly Mina), why big companies hesitated to launch open-ended chatbots, and how that led him and co-founder Daniel de Freitas to start Character.ai. He also explores user behavior on Character.ai, emotional and parasocial use cases, safety tradeoffs, commercialization plans, and his broader motivation of using AI progress as a lever toward AGI and solving real-world problems like medicine.

🔗 RELATED EPISODES

Amex Global Business Travel: The World’s First AI Take Private with Long Lake CEO Alexander Taubman

Baseten CEO Tuhin Srivastava on Custom Models, and Building the Inference Cloud

No Priors Ep. 27 | With Sarah Guo & Elad Gil

No Priors Ep. 105 | With Director of the Center of AI Safety Dan Hendrycks

No Priors Ep. 6 | With Daphne Koller from Insitro

No Priors Ep. 5 | With Huggingface’s Clem Delangue