Pavlo Gonchar Lightrocket | Getty Images
The founder of one of the hottest AI startups Character.AI is joining us again Google along with other team members.
Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, in addition to certain members of the Character.AI research team, are joining Google’s AI unit DeepMind, the company said Friday.
Character.AI uses a large language model to allow users to create chatbots and interact with those created by other users. The startup reached a valuation of $1 billion as the AI ​​boom began last year. Character.AI does not generate revenue but says it is considering offering a subscription service in the future.
The two founders left Google in 2021 after the search giant reportedly rejected efforts to test Google to advance chatbots. He later started Character.AI in the same year.
Freitas criticized the slow-moving company, telling Axios last March “There’s some overlap, but we believe Google won’t do anything exciting,” about the Bard-now Gemini conversation. “Because we work there.”
Character.AI will grant Google a non-exclusive license to its current large language model (LLM) technology, the company’s blog post said. “This agreement will provide increased funding for Character.AI to continue to grow and focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world,” he said.
“But in the last two years, the landscape has changed – many more trained models are now available,” the blog post continues. “Because of these changes, we can see the advantage of using a larger third-party LLM alongside our own. This allows us to devote more resources to post-training and create new product experiences for our growing user base.”
Alphabet, facing criticism for losing out on the AI ​​chatbot craze by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has made changes to its organization to get to market faster. Late last year, Google was reportedly in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI.
“I am very excited to return to Google and work as part of the Google DeepMind team,” Shazeer said in a statement on Friday. “I’m very proud of everything we’ve built on Character.AI over the past 3 years. I’m confident that the funding from Google’s non-exclusive license agreement along with the amazing Character.AI team positions Character.AI for continued success in the future”
A Google spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC “We are very happy to welcome back Noam, a leading researcher in machine learning, who joined the Google DeepMind research team, along with several colleagues.”
The move also comes amid a competitive talent and AI landscape, which has seen companies forge partnerships against a tough regulatory landscape that has scrutinized mergers and acquisitions. Britain’s competition watchdog said earlier this week, for example, that Google is seeking a partnership with Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup.
In March, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind that Google acquired in 2014, and many of his staff to lead the AI ​​initiative. Suleyman is executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella. Last month, British regulators opened a merger investigation into the hiring of Microsoft employees.
