Google paid $2.7 billion to rehire an artificial intelligence genius who left the tech giant in a huff three years ago to found his own startup, according to a report. Noam Shazeer, a 48-year-old software engineer who was first hired by Google as one of its first few hundred employees back in 2000,

Just last month, Google and Character.AI revealed that Shazeer, De Freitas and certain members of Character.AI’s research team would be joining Google’s AI unit DeepMind.

Google pays $2.7 billion to rehire AI expert Noam Shazeer, who left to found Character.AI. Noam Shazeer returns to lead efforts on Gemini.