Character.AI’s Noam Shazeer on what we know about AI—and what we don’t

Portrait of Noam Shazeer (Credit: Winni Wintermeyer for The Washington Post—Getty Images)

When Noam Shazeer is thinking, he puts his face in his hands, and goes somewhere else.

Not literally, of course. He’s still across from me, in a Character.AI conference room that will later host an employees’ Dungeons & Dragons night he doesn’t attend. But he’s mentally elsewhere, searching for a mathematically perfect answer.