Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Winni Wintermeyer for The Washington Post via Getty Images; Shutterstock OpenAI, a company currently fighting more than a dozen consumer safety and wrongful death lawsuits, just hired Noam Shazeer — a cofounder of the notorious AI companion startup Character.AI, which has settled a pile of lawsuits over teen suicides linked to its chatbots and weathered an almost comical number of other controversies