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The founder of one of the hottest artificial intelligence startups, Character.AI, rejoins Google Together with other team members.
Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, as well as certain members of the Character.AI research team, will join Google's artificial intelligence unit DeepMind, the companies said on Friday.
Character.AI uses large language models to allow users to build chatbots and interact with chatbots created by other users. As the artificial intelligence boom began last year, the startup was valued at $1 billion. Character.AI was not generating revenue at the time but said it was considering offering a subscription service in the future.
Following the search giant, two founders left Google in 2021 It is said Rejected their attempts to get Google to push chatbot development. In the same year, they founded Character.AI.
Freitas criticized Axios last March for the company's slow progress and that “there is some overlap, but we believe Google will never do anything interesting” involving Bard (now the Gemini chatbot). “Because we worked there.”
Character.AI will provide Google with a non-exclusive license to its current Large Language Model (LLM) technology, which the company Blog article state. “This agreement will Character.AI Continue to develop and focus on building personalized artificial intelligence products for users around the world.
“However, in the past two years, things have changed – there are now more pre-trained models available,” the blog post continues. “Given these changes, we see the advantage of making greater use of third-party LLMs and our own LLMs. This allows us to invest more resources in post-training and create new opportunities for our growing user base. product experience.
Alphabet, facing criticism that the artificial intelligence chatbot craze was beaten by OpenAI's ChatGPT, has made changes to its organization to get to market faster. Late last year, Google It is said In talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI.
“I'm extremely excited to return to Google and work as part of the Google DeepMind team,” Shazer said in a statement on Friday. “I'm extremely proud of everything we've built at Character.AI over the past three years. .I am confident that the funding from the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement and the incredible Character.AI team will enable Character.AI to continue to be successful in this space.
“We are especially pleased to welcome back Noam, a distinguished researcher in the field of machine learning, who will join a handful of his colleagues on the Google DeepMind research team,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC.
The move also comes amid a highly competitive environment for talent and artificial intelligence, leading companies to form partnerships and scrutinize mergers and acquisitions amid a tight regulatory environment. For example, Britain's competition watchdog said earlier this week it was investigating Google's partnership with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
March, Microsoft Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, an artificial intelligence startup acquired by Google in 2014, and most of his employees were hired to lead the artificial intelligence project. Suleiman becomes executive vice president and CEO of artificial intelligence at Microsoft, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella. Last month, British regulators launched a merger investigation into Microsoft's employee recruitment.