Google Hires Chatbot Startup Character.AI Founder

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Google has hired the founders of chatbot maker Character.AI and signed a licensing deal for the company’s model, the latest in a series of deals where tech giants are buying teams and technology from promising startups.

Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who co-founded Character.AI in 2022, will join Google along with several other employees from the startup. Shazeer, who has worked at Google twice, will join DeepMind, the AI ​​research division that develops large-scale language models and Gemini products such as chatbots.

“We are confident that the funding from the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement and the incredible Character.AI team will position Character.AI for continued success in the future,” Shazeer said.

Character.AI, backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and others, uses LLM to generate conversations in the style of a variety of characters and personas. The company quickly gained millions of monthly users, outperforming competing tools from Big Tech rivals.

Meta has shed its own effort to integrate AI persona chatbots into Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp less than a year after launching them.

The Character.AI and Google deal, first reported by TechCrunch, follows similar partnerships between Microsoft and Inflection and Amazon and Adept. In both cases, promising AI startups licensed their technology to big tech partners, who also hired the founding teams.

A similar deal was proposed between Microsoft and OpenAI last year amid the startup’s boardroom crisis, but OpenAI ultimately continued as an independent entity.

The startups’ desire to form close relationships with Big Tech reflects the intense competition and high costs of developing cutting-edge AI models. The unusual deal is also designed to protect Big Tech groups from antitrust regulators who are increasingly taking a hard line on M&A in this sector.

Character.AI has signed a deal with Google after discussing partnerships with several competing groups, including Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI.

Shazeer is a highly respected researcher who led a team at Google that developed powerful language models. According to people who know him, he is focused on developing super-strong AI.

“Noam wants to create artificial general intelligence, and he thinks it could be done if we had the resources,” they said.

He joined Google in 2000 when it had just 200 employees and left in 2009. He rejoined Google in 2012 and stayed there until he left to found Character.AI.

Google said it was “extremely pleased” that “he and several of his colleagues” would join the DeepMind team.

The company said in a blog post on Friday that most of the Character.AI team will remain with the startup and “continue to build the Character.AI product and serve its growing user base.”

He added that Dominic Perella, Character.AI’s general counsel, will serve as interim CEO.