The founders of Character.AI, one of the hottest artificial intelligence companies around, are back at Google. It follows them back to the company which they had left in 2021 after their chatbot technology ideas were reportedly not supported by Google. Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, together with some members of their research team, will be joining DeepMind, Google’s AI unit. The move is making waves in tech circles and raises questions on the future of AI.
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Character.AI was established by Shazeer and De Freitas in 2021 and it quickly gained popularity due to its chatbots. It became a unicorn last year with a valuation of $1 billion during the last year’s AI boom despite being unprofitable then.
Fun fact: In fact, these two founders resigned from Google last year because they claimed that it did not support their vision for carrying on with other chatbot technologies. According to De Freitas, who even called out Google for being too slow and said “Google would never do anything fun,” unlike his startup.
What’s surprising is that now they are going back to Google. Under this arrangement Character.AI will assign to Google a non-exclusive license for using its large language model (LLM) technology. This agreement will lead to additional funding for Character.AI which will assist it in scaling up as well as creating personalized AI products.
There has been a rapid transformation in artificial intelligence over the past two years. While still employing their own LLMs, they see benefits from employing third-party LLMs like OpenAI GPT 3 as an option among many pre-trained models available on the market that can enhance user experience.
This is happening at a critical point for Google though. The firm has been criticized for lagging behind when it comes to AI chatbots most notably following OpenAI’s success with ChatGPT. Therefore, through rehiring these experienced researchers, google believes it can have a stronger grip on the AI market which is highly competitive.
This is part of a wider trend in the tech industry. By hiring talents from startups and partnering with them, major companies are seeking to keep up with AI. The problem is that this approach may attract attention from regulators as well; for example, UK‘s competition watchdog intends to scrutinize Google’s collaboration with AI startup Anthropic.
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Such moves also expose the challenges that startups face when they compete against established tech giants in AI. Notably, it demonstrates the high value of AI competence and strong competition for top talent in this sector.
Consequently, developments like this could result in more advanced and diverse AI solutions for users of the technology. Therefore, there might be faster progress and innovation across various platforms if big techs incorporate new personnel and ideas into their structures from across other spheres leading to further progress in AI apps.
