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On August 2nd local time, Character.AI, a popular unicorn company that produces role-playing AI companion products, underwent a core management change, with its two founders returning to their old employer, Google.

Character.AI said in an official announcement that founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, as well as some members of the research team, will join Google, and the company's general counsel Dominic Perella will serve as interim CEO.

In September 2022, Chazelle and Freitas founded Character.AI to provide users with chatbot services with set character personalities. The AI ​​characters on the Character.AI platform cover images such as politicians, business tycoons, celebrities, or virtual anime characters. These AI character images are created by users and released to the community for others to experience and use. In late June this year, Character.AI launched a new call function, allowing users to have voice conversations with AI characters.

Character.AI stated in the announcement that the company has accumulated millions of users, and after the founder leaves, most of the company's team will be retained to continue to build products and provide services.

According to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, Character.AI's current valuation is approximately US$2.5 billion, significantly higher than its previous valuation of US$1 billion.

For Chazer and Freitas, joining Google is a career return.

As one of the famous "Transformer Eight", in 2017, while still working at Google, Chazelle and his colleagues co-authored the paper "Attention is all you need", laying the foundation for the big model wave. Later, the eight authors of this paper "escaped" from Google one after another to start their own businesses.

From 2018 to 2021, Freitas also worked as a software engineer at Google.

Chazer stated that he was very happy to return to Google and become a member of the Google DeepMind team. Google also said: "We welcome the return of Noam, an outstanding researcher in the field of machine learning." Google DeepMind is the product of Google's response to the wave of generative AI in April 2023. It is a merger of the Google Brain and DeepMind teams.

Character.AI also announced that it has reached a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Google for large model technology, which will bring Character.AI more funds to support its business.

In fact, despite its reputation, Character.AI has been short of funding for a long time. The last round of funding was in March 2023, when the well-known venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) led a $150 million Series A funding round.

The departure of the founding team of Character.AI is just one of many cases this year where the heads of AI unicorns were recruited by technology giants. In March, the two founders of AI startup Inflection AI "ran away", and the company's CEO Mustafa Suleyman and chief scientist Karen Simonyan announced that they would join Microsoft and take most of Inflection AI's employees with them. Suleyman then led the newly established Microsoft Artificial Intelligence Division, focusing on artificial intelligence products such as Microsoft Copilot.

The strategy of "acquiring" people instead of companies has also aroused the vigilance of antitrust agencies. In July, the UK Competition and Markets Authority announced that it would evaluate Microsoft's hiring of Suleiman and most of Inflection AI's employees to determine whether it constituted a merger and acquisition under UK legal rules, which weakened competition in the AI ​​field.

Coincidentally, Inflection AI and Character.AI are also in the AI ​​social companion product track. The former launched the so-called "high EQ" AI chatbot product Pi AI in May 2023, positioning it as a companion that provides emotional support for people.

The founders of two AI companion product startups have left their companies one after another, raising doubts about the business prospects of AI companion products.

Written by: Yang Liu, trainee reporter of Southern Metropolis Daily