Google’s $2.7 Billion AI Hire Tests Company’s Speech Limits With Inflammatory Posts

Last year, Google paid a fortune to bring Noam Shazeer back to the company. Since then, the AI pioneer has sparred with colleagues on Google’s employee discussion forums over his views on transgender identity, the Gaza conflict and other topics, prompting Google to delete his posts.

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Photo of Noam Shazeer by Getty Images. Art by Mike Sullivan

This spring, Google AI leader Noam Shazeer posted a comment in one of the company’s internal discussion forums, in response to a post about how Google employees could support their transgender and nonbinary colleagues on International Transgender Day of Visibility.

“I do not believe that humans have an attribute called gender,” Shazeer wrote, according to a copy of the post viewed by The Information. “I do not believe that G-d puts people in the wrong bodies. I do not believe that it is okay to sterilize children. You have the right to your beliefs. I do not share them.”