Character.AI An AI Startup's Challenges and Focus Shift

TapTechNews October 2nd news, Character.AI is an AI startup founded by former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel DeFreitas, and has previously raised $193 million (currently about 1.356 billion yuan) in venture capital funds.

In August this year, Google poached two founders and 20% of the company's employees with $2.7 billion (TapTechNews note: currently about 18.967 billion yuan).

The Financial Times reported that Character.ai's new interim CEO, Dominique Pereira, said that the company has basically given up the race in the field of large language models against other better-funded competitors.

He said that Character.ai will focus on its popular consumer product, the chatbot that simulates the conversation styles of various characters and celebrities, including chatbots designed by users.

The cost of training the cutting-edge model is ridiculously high... Even a very considerable startup budget is extremely difficult to afford. Our consumer product has received incredible attention, but there are differences within the company. Some people want to focus on training the most cutting-edge models, while others with a consumer background want to see the takeoff of this product.

Insiders revealed that in August, Google hired 20% of Character.ai's employees to join its AI department DeepMind and spent $2.7 billion to buy a one-time license of the company's model (excluding future technologies).