Prime number: Here’s $2.7b, please come back

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Paying $2.7 billion to rehire one (1) single human person is not going to help Big Tech beat the “spends too much on artificial intelligence” allegations. Per the Wall Street Journal, Google shelled out the ungodly sum to bring back AI whiz Noam Shazeer, who quit the tech giant in 2021 after it refused to publicly release his chatbot. Officially, the payment was to license technology from Shazeer’s startup, Character.AI, but unofficially, the real motive was to make Shazeer a Google employee again, the WSJ reported. Thanks to his stake in the startup, he’s reportedly making hundreds of millions of dollars to rejoin his former employer. So next time you swear never to work somewhere again, remember that there’s a nonzero chance they will pay you almost $3b to return (if you are an AI genius).—AE