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Founders of one in all the most popular artificial intelligence startups Character.AI are rejoining Google together with other team members.
Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, along with certain members of Character.AI’s research team, are joining Google’s AI unit DeepMind, the businesses said Friday.
Character.AI uses large language models to permit users to create chatbots and interact with those created by other users. The startup reached a $1 billion valuation because the AI boom began last yr. Character.AI didn’t generate revenue then but said it was considering offering a subscription service in the long run.
The 2 founders left Google in 2021 after the search giant reportedly rebuffed their attempts to try to get Google to push a chatbot forward. They went on to start out Character.AI that very same yr.
Freitas criticized the corporate’s slow-moving pace, telling Axios last March, “There are some overlaps, but we’re confident Google won’t ever do anything fun,” regarding the Bard, which is now Gemini chatbot.
Character.AI will provide Google with a nonexclusive license for its current large language model, or LLM, technology, the corporate’s blog post states. “This agreement will provide increased funding for Character.AI to proceed growing and to give attention to constructing personalized AI products for users around the globe,” it states.
“Over the past two years, nonetheless, the landscape has shifted — many more pre-trained models at the moment are available,” the blog post continues. “Given these changes, we see a bonus in making greater use of third-party LLMs alongside our own. This enables us to devote much more resources to post-training and creating recent product experiences for our growing user base.”
Alphabet, facing criticism of getting beat to the AI chatbot craze by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has enacted changes to its organization to maneuver more quickly to market. Late last yr, Google was reportedly in talks to speculate a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of dollars in Character.AI.
“I’m super excited to return to Google and work as a part of the Google DeepMind team,” Shazeer said in an announcement on Friday. “I’m so pleased with every thing we built at Character.AI over the past 3 years. I’m confident that the funds from the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement along with the incredible Character.AI team positions Character.AI for continued success in the long run.”
A Google spokesperson said in an announcement to CNBC, “We’re particularly thrilled to welcome back Noam, a preeminent researcher in machine learning, who’s joining Google DeepMind’s research team, together with a small variety of his colleagues.”
The move also comes amid a competitive talent and AI landscape, leading firms to form partnerships against a tricky regulatory landscape that has placed scrutiny on mergers and acquisitions. Britain’s competition watchdog said earlier this week it’s looking into Google’s partnership with AI startup Anthropic, for instance.
In March, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of AI startup DeepMind that Google acquired in 2014, and far of its staff to guide AI initiatives. Suleyman became an executive vice chairman and CEO of Microsoft AI, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella. Last month, U.K. regulators opened a merger probe on Microsoft’s hiring of the staff.
