Noam Shazeer, every mention
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Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 7:05 David Rosenthal Jen Thrun, Noam Shazir, all the DeepMind folks, Demis Hassabis, Shane Legge, Mustafa Suleiman.
- ▶ 9:58 David Rosenthal A Google engineer named Georges Herrick is talking over lunch with Ben Gomes, famous Google engineer who I think would go on to lead search, and a relatively new engineering hire named Noam Shazir.
- ▶ 11:59 David Rosenthal So, this conversation is happening, you know, this is 25 years ago, and Noam, the new hire, the, you know, young buck, he sort of stops in his tracks and he's like, wow.
- ▶ 12:32 David Rosenthal So, Gnome kind of latches onto Georges.
- ▶ 13:13 David Rosenthal A large number of people thought it was a really bad thing for Noam and I to spend our talents on, but Sanjay Gamowat, Sanjay of course being Jeff Dean's famous prolific coding partner, thought it was cool.
- ▶ 13:32 David Rosenthal Sanjay thinks it's a good idea, and no one in the world is as smart as Sanjay, so why should Noam and I accept your view that it's a bad idea?
- ▶ 13:47 David Rosenthal So, all of this ends up taking Noam and Georges deep down the rabbit hole of probabilistic models for natural language.
- ▶ 14:25 David Rosenthal Gnome created this.
- ▶ 20:27 David Rosenthal So Jeff and Noam talk about this on the DoorCash podcast.
- ▶ 1:57:35 Ben Gilbert I bring this up because that is exactly how you pitched the micro kitchen conversation with Noam Shazir in 2002 1001, 17 years earlier.
- ▶ 1:57:47 David Rosenthal Well, so speaking of Noam Shazir, he learns about this project and he decides, hey, I've got some experience with this.
- ▶ 1:58:05 David Rosenthal And it's a good thing he did, because before Gnome joined the project, they had a working implementation of the transformer, but it wasn't actually producing any better results than LSTMs.
- ▶ 1:58:16 David Rosenthal Gnome joins the team, basically pulls a Jeff Dean, rewrites the entire code base from scratch, and when he's done, the transformer now crushes the LSTM-based Google Translate solution.
- ▶ 1:58:45 David Rosenthal And there are all sorts of quotes from the other members of the team just littered all over this piece with things like, Gnome is a magician.
- ▶ 1:58:52 David Rosenthal Gnome is a wizard.
- ▶ 1:58:54 David Rosenthal Gnome took the idea and came back and said, it works now.
- ▶ 1:59:01 Ben Gilbert And you wonder why Noam and Jeff Dean are the ones together working on the next version of Gemini now.
- ▶ 1:59:07 David Rosenthal Noam and Jeff Dean are definitely two peas in a pod here.
- ▶ 2:01:21 David Rosenthal So the team and Noam were like, yo, this thing has a lot, a lot of potential.
- ▶ 2:03:23 Ben Gilbert And of course, Noam starting Character AI, which, what are we calling it?
- ▶ 2:03:29 Ben Gilbert He would end up back at Google via some strange licensing and IP and hiring agreement on the few billion dollars order.
- ▶ 2:20:33 David Rosenthal So, Noam Shazir, incredible engineer, re-architected the Transformer, made it work, one of the lead authors of the paper, storied career within Google, has all of this sway, should have all of this sway within the company.
- ▶ 2:21:29 David Rosenthal Gnome, though, immediately starts advocating to Google leadership.
- ▶ 2:21:51 David Rosenthal And then Gnome actually goes ahead and builds a chatbot interface to a large transformer model.
- ▶ 2:22:07 David Rosenthal There is a chatbot in the, like, late teens, twenty-twenty time frame that Gnome has built within Google.
- ▶ 2:25:17 David Rosenthal Gnome knew, and people in Google knew, that you could make a chatbot interface to a transformer-based LLM, and that was a really compelling product.
- ▶ 2:29:16 David Rosenthal Before we talk about what that unleashes within Google, which is the famous code red, to rewind a little bit back to Noam and the chat bot within Google, Mina.
- ▶ 2:29:55 David Rosenthal Gnome is still advocating to leadership, we gotta release this thing.
- ▶ 2:30:00 David Rosenthal He leaves in twenty-twenty-one and founds a chatbot company, Character AI, that still exists to this day, and they raise a lot of money, as you would expect, and then Google ultimately in twenty-twenty-four, after ChatGPT launches, pays…
- ▶ 2:30:26 Ben Gilbert Yeah, I think Larry and Sergey were like, mm, if we're gonna compete seriously, we kind of need Gnome back and blank check to go get him.
- ▶ 3:09:18 David Rosenthal Once they get Noam back, when they do the deal with Character AI, bring him back into the fold,
- ▶ 3:09:24 David Rosenthal Noam joins the Gemini team, and Jeff and Noam are the two co-technical leads for Gemini now, so.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:40:05 David Rosenthal His collaborator on the AlexNet paper, Ilya Sutskiver, founding scientist of OpenAI, Dario Amadei, co-founder with his sister of Anthropic, Andre Karpathy, until recently chief AI scientist at Tesla, Chris Ola, Noam Shazir, Ian Goodfellow,…