Nandini Roy Choudhury, writer
Brief news
- The founders and team members of Character.AI are returning to Google, with the research team joining Google’s AI unit, DeepMind.
- Character.AI is known for its language models and chatbot development, and had a valuation of over $1 billion.
- The move is part of a competitive talent and AI landscape, with companies forming partnerships due to regulatory restrictions on mergers and acquisitions.
Detailed news
The founders of Character.AI, one of the most popular artificial intelligence enterprises, and additional team members are returning to Google.
Additionally, certain members of Character.AI , as well as Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas.The research team of Character.AI is joining Google’s AI unit, DeepMind, the companies announced on Friday.
Character.AI employs extensive language models to enable users to develop chatbots and engage with those developed by other users. As the AI surge commenced last year, the startup’s valuation surpassed $1 billion. Character.AI did not generate revenue at that time; however, it expressed interest in providing a subscription service in the future.
The two founders reportedly withdrew from Google in 2021 after the search engine behemoth reportedly rejected their attempts to convince the company to advance a chatbot. That same year, they established Character.AI.
During an interview with Axios in March of last year, Freitas expressed his dissatisfaction with the company’s sluggish pace, stating, “There are some overlaps, but we’re confident Google will never do anything fun” in reference to the Bard, which is now a Gemini chatbot.
Character.AI According to the company’s blog post, AI will grant Google a nonexclusive license for its existing large language model (LLM) technology. “This agreement will increase the funding for Character.”It is stated that Character.AI will continue to expand and will concentrate on the development of customized AI products for consumers worldwide.
The blog post continues, “However, the landscape has changed in the past two years, and there are now a plethora of pre-trained models available.” “In light of these modifications, we perceive a benefit in incorporating third-party LLMs in addition to our own.” This enables us to allocate additional resources to the development of new product experiences and post-training for our expanding user base.
Alphabet has implemented organizational modifications to accelerate its market entry in response to criticism that it was surpassed by OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the AI chatbot frenzy. It was reported that Google was in discussions to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character late last year Character.AI.
Shazeer expressed his enthusiasm for his return to Google and his participation in the Google DeepMind team in a statement released on Friday. “I am immensely proud of the progress we have made at Character.AI.”The advancement of artificial intelligence in the past three years. I am certain that the funds from the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement, in conjunction with the exceptional Character.AI team, will enable Character.AI to maintain its trajectory of growth.
In a statement to CNBC, a Google spokesperson expressed their enthusiasm for the return of Noam, a distinguished machine learning researcher. He will be joining the research team of Google DeepMind, along with a select number of his colleagues.
The move also occurs in the context of a competitive talent and AI landscape, which has prompted companies to establish partnerships in response to a stringent regulatory environment that has imposed restrictions on mergers and acquisitions. For instance, the competition watchdog in Britain announced earlier this week that it is investigating Google’s collaboration with AI startup Anthropic.
Microsoft appointed Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind, an AI startup that Google acquired in 2014, and a significant portion of its staff in March to oversee AI initiatives. Suleyman was appointed as the executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, where he was responsible for reporting to CEO Satya Nadella. A merger investigation was initiated by U.K. regulators last month regarding Microsoft’s recruitment of the personnel.
Source : CNBC News
