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Google has hired the founders of chatbot maker Character.AI and signed a deal to license its models, the most recent in a series of deals during which major tech corporations are buying up teams and technology from promising startups.
Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who co-founded Character.AI in 2022, will join Google together with numerous other employees from the startup. Shazeer, who has worked at Google twice before, will join the AI research division DeepMind, which develops large language models and the Gemini suite of AI products resembling chatbots.
“I’m confident that the funding from the non-exclusive Google license agreement, along with the incredible Character.AI team, will position Character.AI for continued success in the longer term,” said Shazeer.
Character.AI, backed by enterprise capital firm Andreessen Horowitz amongst others, uses LLMs to generate conversation within the kind of various characters and personalities. It has quickly attracted tens of millions of monthly users, outpacing rival tools launched by Big Tech rivals.
Meta recently put its own efforts to integrate AI persona chatbots into Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp on hold, lower than a yr after their launch.
Character.AI's cope with Google, first reported by TechCrunch, follows similar collaborations between Microsoft and Inflection and Amazon and Adept. In each cases, the promising AI startups licensed their technology to big-tech partners who also hired their founding teams.
An analogous deal was mooted last yr during a board crisis on the startup Microsoft and OpenAI, but OpenAI ultimately remained an independent company.
The startups' desire to forge close ties with Big Tech corporations reflects the intense competition and high costs of developing cutting-edge AI models. The unusual deals are also intended to guard the Big Tech corporations from antitrust authorities, that are taking an increasingly hard line on mergers and acquisitions within the sector.
Character.AI made the cope with Google after discussing a partnership with numerous rival groups, including Meta and Elon Musk's xAI.
Shazeer is a highly respected researcher who led a team at Google that developed a strong language model. According to a one that knows him, he is concentrated on developing super-powerful AI.
“Noam desires to develop artificial general intelligence and believes he could achieve this if he has the resources,” they said.
He began at Google in 2000, when the corporate had just 200 employees, and left in 2009. He rejoined Google in 2012 and stayed until he left to begin Character.AI.
Google said it was “particularly pleased” to welcome him back “together with a small variety of his colleagues” who will join the DeepMind team.
Most of the Character.AI team will remain on the startup, where they are going to “proceed to develop the Character.AI product and serve our growing user base,” the corporate said in a blog post on Friday.
Dominic Perella, General Counsel of Character.AI, will function interim CEO, it said.
