Google has hired the founders of chatbot maker Character.AI and made a deal to license its models. Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who founded Character.AI in 2022, will join Google along with other employees from the startup. Shazeer will join the AI research division DeepMind, which develops large language models and the Gemini suite of AI products like chatbots.
I am confident that the funds from the non-exclusive Google license agreement, along with the incredible Character.AI team, will position Character.AI for future success," said Shazeer.
Character.AI, backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, uses large language models (LLMs) to generate conversations in the style of various characters and personalities. It has quickly gained millions of monthly users, surpassing rival tools from major tech companies. Meta recently halted its own efforts to integrate AI personality chatbots into Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
The deal between Character.AI and Google, first reported by TechCrunch, follows similar agreements between Microsoft and Inflection as well as Amazon and Adept. In both cases, the promising AI startups licensed their technology to major technology partners, who also hired their founding teams.
A similar deal was considered between Microsoft and the start-up during a crisis in the board of OpenAI, but OpenAI ultimately remained independent.
The ambition of startups to forge close ties with large technology companies reflects the extreme competition and high costs of developing advanced AI models. These unusual deals are also designed to protect major technology corporations from antitrust authorities, who are increasingly cracking down on mergers and acquisitions in this sector.
Character.AI reached an agreement with Google after talks with several rival groups, including Meta and Elon Musk's xAI, about a partnership.
Shazeer, a highly regarded researcher who led a team at Google to develop a powerful language model, is focused on the development of super-powerful AI. "Noam wants to build artificial general intelligence and believes he could do it if he had the resources," said a person close to him.
He started at Google in 2000, when the company had only 200 employees, and left in 2009. He returned in 2012 and stayed until his departure to found Character.AI.
Google expressed being "particularly pleased" to welcome him back "along with a small number of his colleagues" who will be joining the DeepMind team.
The majority of the Character.AI team will remain at the start-up, where they will 'continue to develop the Character.AI product and support our growing user base,' the company announced in a blog post on Friday.
Dominic Perella, the General Counsel of Character.AI, will act as interim CEO, the company added.
