Character.AI, a fairly significant player in the generative artificial intelligence revolution, has shared some big news related to its founders and Google.
Primarily, the two companies have signed an agreement that will see Google fund Character.AI for non-exclusive access to its large language model (LLM) technology. It will also see Character.AI founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas leave the company with certain members of the research team and join Google"s DeepMind which works on AI. The two founders used to work at Google.
To be clear, this development does not mean the end of Character.AI. Former Snap Inc. executive Dominic Perelle will become the interim CEO until a permanent leader is found. One shift that will take place is that Character.AI will no longer focus as much on training its LLM and will instead throw more resources at post-training and creating new product experiences for its users.
Character.AI said that it will hold onto its "talented team" to continue building the Character.AI product. In its announcement about the future, the company said:
"As we enter this next phase of growth, we will continue to invest in our post-training capabilities, with the flexibility to use our own or externally available LLMs. We are excited for the future of Character.AI, and are committed to serving our users through innovative new products.
We are incredibly grateful to Noam, Daniel, and team for bringing Character.AI to life. We look forward to building on top of their contributions in this next phase of growth for Character.AI."
Character.AI announced its latest feature back in June, it"s called Character Calls. With this feature, you can place a call with various characters, when I tried this with Dragon Ball Z"s Goku and Harry Potter, it sounded quite like them too which is pretty cool, but there is room for improvement. Character.AI said that this feature is completely free of charge.