Google paid $2.7B for Noam Shazeer
Google paid approximately $2.7 billion two years ago to hire Noam Shazeer and his team via Character AI, but he has now moved to OpenAI.
Snapshot · This Week in Tech (Audio)
TWiT 1089: Robot Butt Crack - Anthropic Banned, But Winning
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Jun 22, 2026
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Apple Raising iPhone Prices, Memory Crunch & Public AI Backlash
At 1:02:00 · chapter starts 1:01:10
Leo reports that Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal that Apple will have to raise prices due to memory chip shortages — kicking off what he expects will be a months-long campaign before September's iPhone launch. The panel traces the chain: data centers are consuming memory at scale, tariffs closed the Strait of Hormuz, GPU and RAM prices have surged, gaming hardware became unaffordable, and young people are furious. Nothing's Carl Pei cancelled the CMF budget phone because RAM now costs double and represents more than half of total phone build cost. This economic pressure, Leo argues, is one real driver behind public anger at AI companies.
Noam Shazeer Moves to OpenAI: The $2.7B Brain Drain from Google
Two years after Google paid roughly $2.7 billion to hire Noam Shazeer via Character AI, the inventor of the transformer architecture — the technology underlying all modern AI — has now moved to OpenAI. Nobody knows what OpenAI offered him, but it must be staggering.
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