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The founders of one of the hottest artificial intelligence startups, Character.AI, are coming back Google together with other team members.
Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, as well as several members of Character.AI's research team, will join Google's AI division DeepMind, the companies announced on Friday.
Character.AI uses large language models to allow users to create chatbots and interact with other users' chatbots. The startup reached a $1 billion valuation at the start of the AI boom last year. Character.AI had no revenue at the time, but said it was considering offering a subscription service in the future.
The two founders left Google in 2021 after the search giant reportedly rebuffed their attempts to get Google to push forward with a chatbot. That same year, they founded Character.AI.
Freitas criticized the company's slow pace, telling Axios last March, “There's some overlap, but we're confident Google will never do anything funny,” regarding Bard, which is now the chatbot Gemini.
Character.AI will provide Google with a non-exclusive license to its current Large Language Model, or LLM, technology, the company's blog post said. “This agreement will provide Character.AI with more resources to continue to grow and focus on developing personalized AI products for users around the world,” it said.
“However, over the past two years, the landscape has changed – there are now many more pre-trained models available,” the blog post continues. “Given these changes, we see an advantage in increasing our use of third-party LLMs in addition to our own LLMs. This allows us to devote even more resources to retraining and creating new product experiences for our growing user base.”
Alphabet, which has been criticized for beating OpenAI's ChatGPT in the AI chatbot craze, has been making changes to its organization to get to market faster. Late last year, Google was reportedly in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI.
“I am thrilled to return to Google and work as part of the Google DeepMind team,” Shazeer said in a statement on Friday. “I am so proud of everything we have built at Character.AI over the past three years. I am confident that the funding from the non-exclusive Google license agreement, together with the incredible Character.AI team, will position Character.AI for continued success in the future.”
A Google spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC: “We are especially pleased to welcome back Noam, an outstanding researcher in machine learning, who joins the Google DeepMind research team along with a small number of his colleagues.”
The move also comes against a backdrop of competition in the talent and AI space that is prompting companies to form partnerships despite strict regulations that scrutinize mergers and acquisitions more closely. The UK competition authority announced earlier this week that it was reviewing Google's partnership with AI startup Anthropic, for example.
March, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of AI startup DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, and much of its staff to lead AI initiatives. Suleyman became executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella. Last month, British regulators launched a merger investigation into Microsoft's hiring of the employees.
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