Comment by dekhn

Noam Shazeer is a long-time googler who worked on machine learning for quite some time (take a look at his patent history, for example https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...)). He was a favorite of Jeff Dean and did some of the most impressive work on ML that I saw at Google. I think at some point in the past, Noam saw that google wasn't supporting his work very well (google research went through a dark time where many researchers with creative ideas were shut down, either for business or reputation reasons, see https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ai-characterai-ceo-no...) and I figure he made a startup because it was a more convenient position for him to do research, even if there wasn't a strong revenue model. Now he returns to Google in a position of deep strength and will be able to continue to pursue extremely ambitious ideas with far less restraint.