Noam Shazeer, the co-founder and CEO of Character.AI, is returning to Google after leaving the company in October 2021 to start the a16z-backed chatbot startup.
Shazeer previously led the team that developed LaMDA, a language model used for conversational AI tools. Daniel De Freitas, another CharacterAI co-founder, is also joining Google along with some other employees from the startup.
Dominic Perella, Character.AI’s general counsel, is becoming the interim CEO. Most of the staff is staying at Character.AI, and Google is signing a non-exclusive agreement to use the startup’s technology.
“I am thrilled to rejoin Google and work as part of the Google DeepMind team. I am immensely proud of what we accomplished at Character.AI over the past 3 years. I am confident that the funds from the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement, combined with the exceptional Character AI team, will enable Character.AI to continue thriving in the future,” Shazeer stated in a statement.
Google confirmed that Shazeer is joining the DeepMind research team, but did not specify his or De Freitas’s exact roles.
“Google DeepMind is delighted to welcome back Noam, a prominent machine learning researcher, who is joining their research team along with a few of his colleagues.
This agreement will provide increased funding for CharacterAI to continue growing and focus on developing personalized AI products for users worldwide.
Character.AI has raised over $150 million in funding, primarily from a16z. The company’s goal of personalized superintelligence required a full-stack approach, including pre-training models, post-training them to power the unique experiences of Character AI, and building a product platform to reach users globally.”
“The landscape has shifted over the past two years, with more pre-trained models now available. Leveraging third-party LLMs alongside our own allows us to devote more resources to post-training and creating new product experiences for our growing user base.
There is a possibility that regulatory bodies, such as the FTC, DoJ, and the EU, will closely scrutinize these reverse acqui-hires.
The CMA in the U.K. is investigating Microsoft’s hiring of key people from Inflection AI to understand if the tech giant is trying to avoid regulatory oversight. The FTC has also opened a similar investigation into Microsoft’s $650 million deal.”
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