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Smart Things
AuthorLi ShuiqingZeR0
Edit Mo Ying

Is the halo of Silicon Valley's star AI unicorns beginning to shatter one by one?

Zhidongxi reported on August 3 that today, celebrity AI emotional companion unicornCharacter.AIAnnounced withGoogleReached an alternative acquisition agreement.

Google pays to buy Character.AINon-exclusive license for large models + two co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas + some researchers (about 30 people)These newly recruited people will participate in Google's Gemini AI project. According to foreign media reports, Google will$2.5 billionBuy out Character.AI investors at a valuation of approximately $88 per share.

This is a familiar operation, similar to the previous sale of Inflection AI to Microsoft and Adept AI to Amazon.It’s not an acquisition, but it’s better than an acquisition. They poached all the key people.。

▲Character.AI official announcement

Character.AI was founded in California, USA in 2021. It was one of the most dazzling star unicorns in the world at the beginning of the AI ​​chatbot craze last year.At its peak, traffic was second only to ChatGPT,existPersonalized AI chatbotThe track can be said to be invincible. With its rich personalities and high emotional intelligence, the AI ​​virtual characters have set off a carnival of "cyber love" in human-computer social interaction.

However, the high number of visits did not bring significant financing and commercial returns.The startup received$150 millionFinancing and valuation$1 billionIt has not announced any new financing since then. In September last year, it was rumored that it was negotiating financing with a valuation of possibly US$5 billion, but this news soon disappeared.

Its revenue mainly comes from a monthly subscription fee of US$9.99, but website analysis platform Similarweb shows that the growth of visits to the Character.AI website has stagnated since May last year, while ChatGPT, which focuses on information needs, continues to break visit records with a huge advantage.

becauseThe censorship mechanism is becoming more stringent, Character.AI recently made changes to its modelAI character chat experience deteriorates, the once sincere replies became short and cold, causing dissatisfaction among original users. Many users began to turn to other AI virtual social platforms.

Previously, Character.AI was rumored to be followingGoogle, Meta, and Musk’s xAIAfter all the companies have completed negotiations, the matter has finally been settled.

However, the rest of Character.AIMore than 100 employeesThe company will continue to operate, with General Counsel Dominic Perella serving as interim CEO. At the same time, Character.AI will switch to third-party models such as Meta's Llama 3.1, and no longer rely on internal self-developed models.

"We are very pleased to welcome back Noam, a distinguished researcher in the field of machine learning, who along with a small number of his colleagues will join the research team at Google DeepMind," a Google spokesperson said in an email.

It is worth mentioning that Character.AI co-founder and CEO Noam Shazeer, who was poached by Google, is one of the famous "Eight Transformer Papers". The Transformer architecture is the foundation of this wave of large language models.

▲Eight authors of the famous Transformer paper Attention Is All You Need

Noam Shazeer worked at Google from 2000 to 2009 and from 2012 to 2021.This is my third time working for Google.In 2021, he and former Google engineer Daniel De Freitas left Google due to dissatisfaction with Google's internal bureaucracy and founded Character.AI, an AI chatbot startup focusing on AI virtual companionship.

▲Noam Shazeer (left), Daniel De Freitas (right)

At present, the "Eight Transformer Papers" have been scattered all over the sky, and have devoted themselves to startups in different fields. Character.AI and Adept AI have joined Silicon Valley technology giants through alternative acquisitions, and AI big model startups Cohere and Sakana AI have become the "golden signs" of the big model industry in Canada and Japan respectively.

This year is recognized as the first year for the implementation of generative AI. Under the shadow of technology giants constantly squeezing out living space and commercial returns failing to make up for losses, how large model startups survive and make profits has become the focus of industry attention.

Even Character.AI, a leading star company that is widely sought after by young people, finds it difficult to survive on a single subscription model, highlighting the commercialization dilemma of the current AI emotional companionship track.

Character.AI's move to Google is also a microcosm of the current reshuffle of Silicon Valley's big model industry. The once-famous Silicon Valley AI unicorns have encountered difficulties one after another, or their core businesses have been difficult to reverse, or they have been unable to raise sufficient funds and computing resources. Being acquired by a large company is undoubtedly a good way to get out of the deadlock.

Silicon Valley giants continue to lay off employees on a large scale, while at the same time investing heavily in AI startups and poaching big model talent, playing the game of "layoffs and advances".

This disguised acquisition of "not buying the company but buying the founder" is gradually becoming "common" from "alternative" in the overseas large-scale model industry, and has attracted the attention of antitrust regulators.