The founders of one in all the most well liked artificial intelligence startups, Character.AI, are coming back Google along with other team members.
Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, in addition to several members of Character.AI's research team, will join Google's AI division DeepMind, the businesses announced on Friday.
Character.AI uses large language models to permit users to create chatbots and interact with other users' chatbots. The startup reached a $1 billion valuation initially of the AI boom last yr. Character.AI had no revenue on the time, but said it was considering offering a subscription service in the long run.
The two founders left Google in 2021 after the search giant According to reports Their attempts to get Google to push a chatbot were rebuffed. That same yr, they founded Character.AI.
Freitas criticized the corporate's slow pace, telling Axios last March, “There's some overlap, but we're confident Google will never do anything funny,” regarding Bard, which is now the chatbot Gemini.
Character.AI will provide Google with a non-exclusive license to its current Large Language Model (LLM) technology, which blog entry States. “This agreement will provide increased funding for Character.AI to proceed to grow and concentrate on developing personalized AI products for users world wide,” it says.
“However, over the past two years, the landscape has modified – there at the moment are many more pre-trained models available,” the blog post continues. “Given these changes, we see a bonus in increasing our use of third-party LLMs along with our own LLMs. This allows us to devote much more resources to retraining and creating latest product experiences for our growing user base.”
Alphabet, which has been criticized for beating OpenAI's ChatGPT in the AI chatbot craze, has made changes to its organization to get to market faster. Late last year, Google According to reports in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI.
“I’m thrilled to return to Google and work as a part of the Google DeepMind team,” Shazeer said in a statement on Friday. “I’m so pleased with all the pieces now we have built at Character.AI over the past three years. 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 long run.”
A Google spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC: “We are especially pleased to welcome back Noam, an impressive researcher in machine learning, who joins the Google DeepMind research team together with a small variety of his colleagues.”
The move also comes against a backdrop of competition in the talent and AI space that is prompting companies to form partnerships despite strict regulations that scrutinize mergers and acquisitions more closely. The UK competition authority announced earlier this week that it was reviewing Google's partnership with AI startup Anthropic, for example.
March, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of AI startup DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, and much of its staff to lead AI initiatives. Suleyman became executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella. Last month, British regulators launched a merger investigation into Microsoft's hiring of the employees.
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