Former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, founders of the AI startup Character.AI, are rejoining Google along with several team members. They will join Google’s AI unit, DeepMind, as announced on Friday.
Character.AI, known for its large language models that allow users to create and interact with chatbots, reached a $1 billion valuation during the AI boom last year. Despite not generating revenue initially, the startup considered offering a subscription service in the future.
Shazeer and De Freitas left Google in 2021 after their efforts to advance a chatbot within the company were reportedly unsuccessful. They founded Character.AI later that year. Freitas criticized Google’s slow pace in innovation, telling Axios last March that they were confident Google would never pursue anything fun, referring to the company’s Bard chatbot, now known as Gemini.
Under the new partnership, Character.AI will provide Google with a nonexclusive license for its large language model (LLM) technology. This agreement aims to increase funding for Character.AI, allowing it to grow and focus on developing personalized AI products for global users. The company’s blog post mentioned the shift in the AI landscape over the past two years, noting the availability of more pre-trained models. Character.AI plans to use third-party LLMs alongside its own, enabling it to allocate more resources to post-training and creating new user experiences.
Alphabet, facing criticism for lagging behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has restructured to accelerate its market presence. Late last year, Google was reportedly considering a substantial investment in Character.AI. Shazeer expressed excitement about returning to Google and joining DeepMind, praising the achievements at Character.AI and expressing confidence in the company’s future success with the support of the new funding and the talented team.
A Google spokesperson welcomed Shazeer and his colleagues, highlighting Shazeer’s prominence in machine learning research. The move comes amid a competitive AI talent landscape and increasing regulatory scrutiny on mergers and acquisitions. The UK’s competition watchdog recently announced an investigation into Google’s partnership with AI startup Anthropic. In a related development, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind, to lead its AI initiatives, prompting a merger probe by UK regulators last month.
Featured Image courtesy of Time
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