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Leidi.com Lotte August 3

AI chatbot startup Character.AI recently announced that it has reached an agreement with Google. As part of this agreement, Character.AI will provide Google with a non-exclusive license for its current LLM technology.

The agreement will provide Character.AI with additional funding to continue its growth and focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world.

Character.AI co-founders Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas and certain members of the research team will also join Google. Most of the outstanding team of Character.AI will continue to stay. Google said Shazeer will join the DeepMind research team.

Character.AI general counsel Dominic Perella has taken on the role of interim CEO.

Perella, a longtime Snap Inc. executive, has been a member of Character’s core leadership team since mid-2023.

“We are pleased to welcome back Noam, a distinguished researcher in the field of machine learning, who will join the research team at Google DeepMind along with a small number of his colleagues,” a Google spokesperson said. “This agreement will provide Character.AI with more funding to continue to grow and focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world.”

According to reports, Google acquired its investor shares at a valuation of $2.5 billion ($88 per share), which is higher than the previous valuation of $1 billion, but still lower than the $5 billion it negotiated with early investors. However, Google and Character.AI did not officially disclose the price of the acquisition.

Last year, it raised $150 million

Character.AI was founded in 2021 by former Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and has attracted backers including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

In March 2023, Character.AI announced the completion of a $150 million round with a valuation of $1 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Talking about joining Google, Character.AI said that in the past two years, the company has built increasingly intelligent models, launched new immersive features for conversations with characters, and has rapidly grown to provide services to millions of users, becoming a part of their daily lives.

“When Noam and Daniel founded Character.AI, our goal of personalized superintelligence required a full-stack approach. We had to pre-train models, post-train them to enhance Character.AI’s unique experience, and build a product platform that could reach users around the world.”

“However, over the past two years, the landscape has changed — there are now more pre-trained models available. Given these changes, we see the advantage of making greater use of third-party LLMs in addition to our own. This allows us to invest more resources in post-training and creating new product experiences for our growing user base.”

Character.AI noted that it has reached an agreement with Google that will enable the company to accelerate progress. As part of this agreement, Character.AI will provide Google with a non-exclusive license for its current LLM technology. The agreement will provide Character.AI with more funds to continue to grow and focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world.

The deal mirrors deals struck by Microsoft and Amazon in recent months, including one in March in which Microsoft paid $650 million for the co-founders and dozens of employees of artificial intelligence startup Inflection.

In June 2024, Amazon hired several co-founders and employees from another AI startup, Adept. Inflection and Adept raised $1.3 billion and $415 million, respectively.

LeiDi was founded by media person Lei Jianping. Please indicate the source if reprinting.