WASHINGTON, July 15 — Noam Shazeer, the computer scientist who co-authored the landmark 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” has built a career that now places him at the center of a growing debate about safety and accountability in consumer artificial intelligence. Shazeer, born in 1975, spent more than two decades at Google, from 2000 to 2021, as a lead researcher. During his tenure, he co-authored the paper that introduced the transformer architecture — the technical foundation underlying virtually all modern large language models.
He also worked on LaMDA, Google’s conversational AI system. In 2021, Shazeer left Google to co-found Character.AI with Daniel De Freitas.
The company launched its platform in 2022, allowing users to create and chat with AI characters, including romantic partners. Shazeer has stated publicly that the platform is designed for “creative and entertainment purposes.”
Rapid growth, unanswered questions
Character.AI raised $150 million in a Series A funding round in March 2023, a round that valued the company at $1 billion. The platform’s rapid adoption has drawn attention from regulators, though as of February 2024, the company had faced no formal regulatory action in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission has contacted Character.AI for information on its data practices.
The company has not implemented robust age verification on its platform, a detail that has drawn scrutiny as the service’s user base has expanded.
A researcher’s path from Google to startup
Shazeer’s trajectory from Google researcher to startup founder mirrors a broader pattern in the AI industry, where engineers who helped build foundational technologies at large companies have left to commercialize those same advances. His work on the transformer paper, co-authored with other Google researchers, reshaped the field of natural language processing and enabled the current generation of chatbots and generative AI tools. At Google, Shazeer contributed to LaMDA, a conversational AI system that demonstrated the ability to sustain open-ended dialogue.
That experience informed the design of Character.AI’s platform, which emphasizes long-form, personality-driven interactions between users and AI characters. The company’s valuation of $1 billion, achieved less than a year after its public launch, reflects investor confidence in the consumer AI market.
The $150 million Series A round in March 2023 provided capital for expansion, though the company has not disclosed detailed user numbers or revenue figures.
Regulatory landscape
Character.AI operates in a regulatory environment that has not yet produced binding rules for AI platforms in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission’s inquiry into the company’s data practices represents the most significant government contact to date, but no enforcement action has followed. The absence of robust age verification on the platform has been noted by observers who study the risks of AI interactions with minors.
Shazeer has described the platform’s purpose as creative and entertainment-oriented, but the company has not publicly detailed what safeguards exist for younger users. As of this writing, Character.AI continues to operate without regulatory restrictions in the U.S., though the FTC’s information request signals ongoing interest from federal authorities in how AI companies handle user data.
