Rakuten on August 3
AI chatbot startup Character.AI recently announced that it has reached an agreement with Google. As part of this Agreement, Character.AI will provide Google with a non-exclusive license to its current LLM technology.
The agreement will provide Character.AI with more funding to continue to grow and focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world.
Character.AI co-founders Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, and certain members of the research team will also join Google. Most of Character.AI's talented teams will remain in place. Google said Shazeer will join the DeepMind research team.
Character.AI General Counsel, Dominic Perella, has assumed the role of Interim Chief Executive Officer.
Perella was a longtime executive at Snap Inc. and has been a member of Character's core leadership team since mid-2023.
"We are pleased to welcome the return of Noam, a distinguished researcher in the field of machine learning, who will join Google's DeepMind research team with a handful of his colleagues." A Google spokesperson said, "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." ”
According to the news, Google is buying its investors' shares at a valuation of $2.5 billion ($88 per share), up from its previous valuation of $1 billion but still below the $5 billion it negotiated with early investors. However, Google and Character.AI officials did not disclose the price of the acquisition.
Last year, it raised $150 million
Character.AI由前谷歌研究人员Noam Shazeer和 Daniel De Freitas于2021年创立，吸引包括前GitHub首席执行官Nat Friedman等支持者。
In March 2023, Character.AI announced the closing of $150 million at a valuation of $1 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Commenting on joining Google, Character.AI said that over the past two years, the company has built increasingly intelligent models, introduced new immersive features that speak to characters, and rapidly evolved to serve millions of users as part of their daily lives.
"When Noam and Daniel started Character.AI, our personalized superintelligence goals required a full-stack approach. We had to pre-train the models, post-train them to enhance the unique experience of Character.AI, and build a product platform that could reach users around the world. ”
"However, in the last two years, the situation has changed – there are now more pre-trained models available. Given these changes, we see the advantages of using more third-party LLMs in addition to our own. This allows us to devote more resources to post-training and create new product experiences for our growing user base. ”
Character.AI noted that an agreement has been reached with Google, which will allow the company to speed up its progress. As part of this Agreement, Character.AI will provide Google with a non-exclusive license to its current LLM technology. The agreement will provide Character.AI with additional funding to continue to grow and focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world.
The deal is the same one that Microsoft and Amazon have struck over the past few months. In March, Microsoft spent $650 million to bring in the co-founder and dozens of employees of artificial intelligence startup Inflection.
In June 2024, Amazon hired several co-founders and employees from another AI startup, Adept. Inflection and Adept raised $1.3 billion and $415 million, respectively.
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