news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

In the early morning of August 3rd, Beijing time, Character.AI announced that Google has agreed to pay model licensing fees to AI digital human unicorn company Character.AI, and will allow Character.AI co-founder and CEO Noam Shazeer and President Daniel De Freitas, as well as Character employees engaged in model training and voice artificial intelligence (30 out of approximately 130 employees) to join Google to participate in the Gemini AI project.

The media previously revealed that Character.AI was having difficulty raising funds and was looking for mergers and acquisitions from Meta and other large companies. Musk's xAI was revealed to be one of the important acquirers, but was later denied by Musk.

Character.AI management reportedly told employees on Friday that investors’ shares will be acquired at a valuation of about $88 per share. That’s about 2.5 times the value of Character’s stock in its 2023 Series A round, which valued the company at $1 billion.

Therefore, Google's overall acquisition of Character.AI will be valued at more than $2.5 billion.

In addition, as the CEO returns to Google with his team, Character.AI appoints the company's general counsel Dom Perella as interim CEO. Moreover, the company will switch to open source models such as Meta Llama 3.1 to support its products instead of using internal models. (Titanium Media)