Google parent company Alphabet (GOOG/GOOGL) has announced a new senior executive to help run its Gemini artificial intelligence (A.I.) business unit.
The technology giant has appointed Noam Shazeer to serve as technical lead on Gemini A.I. moving forward.
Shazeer, a co-founder of start-up company Character.AI, returned to Alphabet earlier this month after departing the company back in 2021.
Shazeer had most recently been working at Google DeepMind, Alphabet’s A.I. research unit.
Shazeer will now work alongside Gemini co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, according to the company.
The appointment of Shazeer is expected to give Alphabet’s A.I. division a boost and speed-up the release of new products by the company.
Over the past year, Alphabet has restructured it’s A.I. operations several times as it races to keep up with start-up companies and long-time rivals such as Microsoft (MSFT).
Recently, Microsoft-backed start-up OpenAI took aim at Google’s core market with an A.I.-powered internet search engine.
Alphabet has also come under criticism from some analysts for being slow to release A.I. products to the public.
The stock of Alphabet has increased 24% over the last 12 months and is currently trading at $163.80 U.S. per share.
