In a significant development within the AI industry, Noam Shazeer, the CEO and co-founder of Character.AI, is making a notable return to Google after departing in October 2021 to establish the chatbot company backed by a16z.
Shazeer, known for leading the team behind the LaMDA language model, is set to rejoin Google’s DeepMind research team. Co-founder Daniel De Freitas and several key staff members from Character.AI are joining him.
This strategic move includes a non-exclusive agreement between Google and Character.AI, aiming to leverage Character.AI’s cutting-edge technology.
While Dominic Perella steps in as acting CEO of Character.AI, most of its employees will remain with the company. This reunion marks a pivotal moment in the AI landscape, promising significant advancements and collaboration between the two entities.
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Google announced Shazeer’s arrival to the DeepMind research team but did not disclose De Freitas’s or Shazeer’s precise positions.
Google released a statement saying, “We’re especially excited to welcome back Noam, a preeminent machine learning researcher, who is joining Google DeepMind’s research team, along with a small number of his colleagues.” Character.AI will receive more funding as a result of this deal. According to a Google representative, it will keep developing and concentrating on creating customized AI solutions for users worldwide.
More than $150 million has been raised for Character.AI, much of it from a16z.
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“A full stack strategy was necessary to achieve our aim of individualized superintelligence when Noam and Daniel founded Character.AI. To fuel the experiences that create character, we had to pre-train and post-train the models. Character.AI stated in its blog post announcing the change, “AI unique, and develop a product platform with the capacity to reach users worldwide.”
“But in the last two years, things have changed; a lot more pre-trained models are now accessible. In light of these modifications, we believe there is a benefit to utilizing third-party LLMs in addition to our own. This allows us to invest even more money in post-training and developing fresh product experiences for our expanding user base.”
It is possible that various regulatory agencies, including the Department of Justice (DoJ) in the EU and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US, will thoroughly examine these reverse acquisitions. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of the United Kingdom (UK) announced last month that it is investigating Microsoft’s hire of key personnel from Inflection AI to determine whether the tech giant is attempting to evade regulatory supervision. In June, the FTC launched a comparable probe to examine Microsoft’s $650 million acquisition.
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