Nom Shazir And Daniel de Freitas The founders of artificial intelligence startup Character.AI, along with some members of the research team, have rejoined DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence unit.
Using large language models, Character.AI allows users to create their own chatbots and interact with chatbots created by other users. With the boom of artificial intelligence, this startup reached a value of one billion dollars last year. At the time, Character.AI had no revenue; But he announced that he plans to offer a subscription service in the future.
The two founders of Character.AI left Google in 2021; Because it was said that the search giant rejected their request and efforts to advance the construction of one of the chatbots. They founded Character.AI that same year.
“There are some overlaps,” Freitas told Axios earlier this year. But we are sure that Google will never do anything interesting.” He had criticized Google’s slow speed in creating the chatbot Bard (currently Jamna).
Character.AI said in a statement that it will grant Google a non-exclusive license to its existing Large Language Model (LLM) technology: “This agreement provides additional funding for Character.AI to continue to grow and focus on building personalized AI products.” Focus for users around the world.
Another part of Character.AI’s statement reads: “Over the past two years, the landscape has changed. More pre-trained models are now available. “With these changes, we see the benefit of leveraging more diverse LLMs alongside our own models, allowing us to devote more resources to training and creating new experiences for our growing users.”
Faced with criticism that it was failing to compete with chatbot ChatGPT, Google made changes to the company to speed things up. Late last year, it was reported that Google was 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 Google’s DeepMind team,” Shazier said in a statement. I’m very proud of everything we’ve built at Character.AI over the past three years. I’m confident that the resources from Google’s non-exclusive licensing agreement, along with Character.AI’s excellent team, will position it for continued success in the future.”
A Google spokesperson said: “We are very excited to welcome back Noam Shazier, a leading researcher in the field of machine learning, who has joined the DeepMind research team along with a number of his colleagues.”
On the other hand, Microsoft in early 2024, Mustafa Suleiman, hired the co-founder of Google’s AI startup DeepMind to lead its AI initiatives. Suleiman was appointed as the executive vice president and director of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence department and supervised Satya Nadella Works. Last month, British regulators opened an investigation into Microsoft’s employment practices.
