AI Unicorn Company Character.AI's Founders and Team Join Google
TapTechNews August 3rd news, according to Bloomberg report, on Friday local time, the founder of AI unicorn company Character.AI, Noam Shazeer and Daniel DeFreitas, as well as some members of the research team joined Google.
According to unnamed informed sources, existing investors will buy out the company's stocks at a price of 2.5 billion US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 17.964 billion yuan). This is much higher than the previous valuation of 1 billion US dollars (currently about 7.186 billion yuan) for the company. However, this is still lower than the high valuation of 50 billion US dollars (currently about 35.929 billion yuan) discussed in the early negotiations with investors last year.
Character.AI said that it will reach a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Google regarding its large language model technology, and at the same time Character.AI will continue to exist. Most of the excellent team of Character.AI will continue to stay and will continue to build the Character.AI product to serve our growing user base.
For the founders of Character.AI, this deal represents a kind of feeling of coming home, and both founders have worked at Google before. During his first job at this tech giant, Shazeer co-authored Attention Is All You Need, a pioneering paper on generative AI. But as of July 2023, all eight authors of this paper have left Google, and many have founded their own high-profile AI startups.
Character.AI allows anyone to create their own custom chatbot, imitating anyone and anything - whether alive, dead or imagined. People have already created millions of chatbots through this platform, and some of them are still very popular conversation partners. For example, users have sent about 371 million messages to the AI Raiden Shogun and Kagemusha (characters in Genshin Impact) on this platform.
Not long ago, some foreign media reported that Musk's AI startup xAI considered acquiring the chatbot manufacturer Character.AI as it is looking for more ways to test the Grok chatbot. However, Musk denied this news through X (Twitter) on August 1.
