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Google has hired the founders of chatbot maker Character.AI and struck a deal to license its models, the latest in a series of deals in which Big Tech companies have scooped up teams and technology from promising start-ups.
Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who co-founded Character.AI in 2022, will join Google along with a number of other staff from the start-up. Shazeer, who has had two previous stints at Google, will join its AI research division, DeepMind, which develops large language models and the Gemini suite of AI products such as chatbots.
”I am confident that the funds from the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement together with the incredible Character.AI team positions Character.AI for continued success in the future,” said Shazeer.
Character.AI, which is backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, among others, uses LLMs to generate conversation in the style of various figures and personas. It has quickly attracted millions of monthly users, outperforming rival tools rolled out by Big Tech rivals.
Meta recently mothballed its own efforts to incorporate AI persona chatbots into Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, less than a year after launching them.
Character.AI’s deal with Google, which was first reported by TechCrunch, follows similar tie-ups between Microsoft and Inflection, and Amazon and Adept. In both cases, the promising AI start-ups licensed their technology to Big Tech partners, which also hired their founding teams.
A similar deal was floated between Microsoft and OpenAI during a boardroom crisis at the start-up last year, though OpenAI ultimately continued as an independent entity.
The desire among start-ups to forge close links to Big Tech companies reflects the extreme competition and high costs of developing cutting-edge AI models. The unusual deals are also designed to insulate Big Tech groups from antitrust regulators who have taken an increasingly hard line on M&A in the sector.
Character.AI struck the deal with Google after discussions with a number of rival groups, including Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI, about a partnership.
Shazeer is a highly regarded researcher who led a team at Google developing a powerful language model. He is focused on developing super-powerful AI, according to a person who knows him.
“Noam wants to build artificial general intelligence and thinks if he had the resources he could,” they said.
He started at Google in 2000, when it had just 200 employees, and left in 2009. He rejoined in 2012 and stayed until he left to found Character.AI.
Google said it was “particularly thrilled” to welcome him back “along with a small number of his colleagues”, who will be joining the DeepMind team.
The majority of Character.AI’s team will remain at the start-up where they “will continue to build the Character.AI product and serve our growing base of users”, the company said in a blog post on Friday.
Dominic Perella, Character.AI’s general counsel, will serve as interim chief executive, it added.
