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The founders of one of the hottest artificial intelligence startups Character.AI are re-joining Google with other members of the group.
Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, along with several other members of Character.AI’s research team, will join Google’s AI unit DeepMind, the companies said on Friday.
Character.AI uses large language models to allow users to create chatbots and interact with chatbots created by other users. The startup has reached $1 billion valuation when the AI craze began last year. Character.AI was not generating revenue at the time but said it was considering offering a subscription service in the future.
The two founders left Google in 2021 after the search giant reported rejected their efforts to try and get Google to promote a chatbot. They went on to start Character.AI that same year.
Freitas criticized the company’s slow pace of development, telling Axios last March, “There’s some overlap, but we believe Google will never do anything interesting” related to Bard, now the Gemini chatbot.
Character.AI will give Google a non-exclusive license to its existing large language model, or LLM, technology. blog post state. “This agreement will provide additional funding for Character.AI to continue to grow and focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world,” the report stated.
“However, over the past two years, the landscape has changed — more pre-trained models are now available,” the blog post continues. “With these changes, we see advantages in using more third-party LLMs alongside our own LLMs. This allows us to devote even more resources to post-training and creating new product experiences for our growing user base.”
Alphabet, which is facing criticism for being beaten to the punch by OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the AI chatbot craze, has issued change for its organizations to move faster to market. Late last year, Google reported is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI.
“I am incredibly excited to be returning to Google and working as a member of the Google DeepMind team,” Shazeer said in a statement on Friday. “I am incredibly proud of everything we have built at Character.AI over the past three years. I am confident that the funding from Google’s non-exclusive licensing agreement, along with the incredible Character.AI team, will enable Character.AI to continue to be successful in the future.”
“We are particularly excited to welcome Noam, a leading machine learning researcher, who will join the Google DeepMind research team, along with a handful of his colleagues,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC.
The move also comes amid competition for talent and the AI landscape, which has forced companies to form partnerships against a tight regulatory backdrop that has placed scrutiny on mergers and acquisitions. Britain’s competition watchdog said earlier this week that it was looking into Google’s partnership with AI startup Anthropic, for example.
March, Microsoft hire Mustafa Suleymana co-founder of AI startup DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, and a majority of its employees will lead its AI initiatives. Suleyman has become executive vice president and chief operating officer of Microsoft AI, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella. Last month, UK regulators opened a merger exploration about Microsoft employee recruitment.
