Ex-Google engineers and founders of generative AI startup Character.AI return to DeepMind in new partnership
Nickie Louise
Posted On August 5, 2024
Ex-Google engineers and Character.AI co-founders are returning to Google’s artificial intelligence unit DeepMind. The news comes just three years after the duo left the search giant to launch the buzziest generative AI startup.
In an announcement on Friday, the two companies said that Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, in addition to certain members of Character.AI’s research team, are joining Google’s AI unit DeepMind to accelerate advancements in AI technology.
As part of the partnership, Google will obtain a non-exclusive license to Character.AI’s large language model (LLM) technology.
In 2021, two founders left Google after the company reportedly dismissed their efforts to advance a chatbot project. They went on to establish Character.AI the same year.
Co-founder Freitas criticized Google’s sluggish pace, telling Axios last March, “There are some overlaps, but we’re confident Google will never do anything fun,” referring to Google’s Bard, now known as the Gemini chatbot.
According to the company’s blog post, “This agreement will provide increased funding for Character.AI to continue growing and to focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world.” The blog post further explains:
“Over the past two years, the landscape has shifted — many more pre-trained models are now available. Given these changes, we see an advantage in making greater use of third-party LLMs alongside our own. This allows us to devote even more resources to post-training and creating new product experiences for our growing user base.”
Facing criticism for lagging behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Alphabet has reorganized to speed up its AI chatbot initiatives. Late last year, Google was reportedly in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI.
Shazeer, one of the founders, expressed excitement about returning to Google, stating, “I am super excited to return to Google and work as part of the Google DeepMind team. I am so proud of everything we built at Character.AI over the last 3 years. I am confident that the funds from the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement together with the incredible Character.AI team positions Character.AI for continued success in the future.”
In an interview, a Google spokesperson told CNBC, “We’re particularly thrilled to welcome back Noam, a preeminent researcher in machine learning, who is joining Google DeepMind’s research team, along with a small number of his colleagues.”
This move comes amid a competitive talent and AI landscape, with companies forming partnerships in response to regulatory scrutiny on mergers and acquisitions. For instance, Britain’s competition watchdog is currently investigating Google’s partnership with AI startup Anthropic.
Google is not alone. Microsoft made a similar move back in March when the Redmond-based tech giant hired DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead its new consumer AI unit has drawn attention. Suleyman, who joined Microsoft as an executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, reports directly to CEO Satya Nadella. Last month, U.K. regulators opened a merger probe into Microsoft’s hiring of the DeepMind staff.
We covered Character.AI In June when the startup reported 1.7 million downloads in its first week. Character.AI was founded in September 2022 by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas. The company’s chatbot enables users to engage in lifelike conversations with their favorite characters, whether they are from fiction, history, or entirely unique to the platform.
