Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer returns to Google

In a large stage, the co-founder and CEO returns from the character. During his previous stay, Shazeer led the research team, which was built by Lamda (language model for dialogue applications), a vocal model used for -KI tools. Google welcomed Noam Shaler and Daniel de Freitas, character co-founder. The agreement includes the character.ai, that Google provides an exclusive license for its current LLM technology and increases the character. AI with increasing funding.

The character co-founder. Ai Daniel de Freitas also follows with certain other employees of the start-up. Dominic Perella, general counsel for Character.AI, is becoming the startup's interim CEO. The company noted that most of the staff will remain at Character.AI. Google is also signing a non-exclusive agreement with Character.AI to use its technology.

"I'm super excited to return to Google and work as part of the Google DeepMind team. I'm so proud of everything we've built at Character.AI over the past 3 years. I am confident that the funds from Google’s non-exclusive licensing agreement, along with the incredible Character.AI team, position Character.AI for continued success in the future,” Shazeer said in a statement . Google said Shazeer will join the DeepMind research team, but did not specify his or De Freitas’ exact roles.

“We are especially excited to welcome Noam, a leading machine learning researcher, to Google DeepMind’s research team, along with a small number of his colleagues,” Google said in a statement. “This agreement will provide Character.AI with additional funding to continue to grow and focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world,” a Google spokesperson said.

Character.AI has raised more than $150 million in funding, largely from a16z. “When Noam and Daniel started Character.AI, our goal of personalized superintelligence required a full-stack approach. We had to pre-range models, post-fire to feed the experiences that make the character special and build a platform of products with the possibility of reaching users globally ", mentioned the character Ai in his blog that announced the move.

“In the last two years, however, the landscape has moved; Many other pre-high models are now available. Given these changes, we see an advantage in making a greater use of third -party LLMs together with ours. This allows us to dedicate even more resources to post-training and the creation of new product experiences for our growing users' base. "

There is the possibility that several regulatory bodies, such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the United States and the EU will examine these reverse assistants up close. Last month. the U.K’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued a notice saying that it is looking into Microsoft hiring key people from Inflection AI to understand if the tech giant is trying to avoid regulatory oversight. The FTC opened a similar investigation in June to look into Microsoft’s $650 million deal.