Google Gets Character.AI Co-founders In New Deal
Summary
As part of the deal, Character.AI co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas will return to Google, according to a Friday blog post by the Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup. Character – which will retain most of its employees with the Google deal – provides chatbot services based on large language models (LLMs) that generate responses and open-ended conversations with users. We look forward to building on top of their contributions in this next phase of growth for Character.AI.” As for the Character co-founders, Shazeer’s Google career started in 2000 as a software engineer, according to his LinkedIn account. During his time with Google, Shazeer led the team of researchers that built the Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, which can power conversational AI products, according to TechCrunch. His resume also includes about four years with Microsoft, leaving in 2016 as a level two software engineer working on natural language processing and automatic open domain question answering for Bing.