2024/08/04 00:36
The author of Transformer returned to Google, and Character.AI founding team was "acquired", as long as the person does not want the company
2024/08/04 00:36
Source | The Heart of the Machine
When I woke up, the "chicken contest" of generative AI was shrinking again.
Startup Character.AI announced Friday that it has signed an agreement with Google for a non-exclusive license to Character.AI's large language model (LLM) technology.
Google also announced the re-hiring of Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas. Noam Shazeer is the founder, CEO of Character.AI, and one of the authors of the Transformer paper, and he was a principal software engineer at Google. Daniel De Freitas is the president of Character.AI and worked as a senior software engineer at Google.
Daniel de Freitas (left) and Noam Shazeer. Source: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/inno/stories/news/2023/03/24/q-a-interview-with-characterai-founders.html
In 2021, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas left Google due to frustration with the bureaucracy of Google, the search giant, and founded Character.AI in 2022. Now, they're back at Google DeepMind with a research team of about 30 people.
A Google spokesperson said in an email: "We are especially pleased to welcome back Noam, a distinguished researcher in the field of machine learning."
Character.AI The remaining approximately 140 employees will remain and face the next step. Character.AI officially released an open letter that reads as follows:
In 2022, we founded Character.AI with the goal of bringing personalized superintelligence to users around the world. Over the past two years, we have made tremendous progress towards this goal. We've built smarter and smarter models, introduced new immersive features to talk to virtual characters, and quickly grew to serve millions of users as part of their daily lives.
When Noam and Daniel founded Character.AI, our goal of achieving personalized superintelligence required a full-stack approach. We had to pre-train and post-train the model to guarantee a unique experience for users on Character.AI and build a platform that could be used by users around the world. However, in the last two years, the technology landscape has changed – there are now more pre-trained models available. Given these changes, we believe it would be advantageous to jointly leverage third-party large language models (LLMs) and our own models. This allows us to devote more resources to post-training and creating new product experiences for our growing user base.
We are pleased to announce that we have entered into an agreement with Google that will allow us to accelerate our progress. Under the agreement, Character.AI will provide Google with a non-exclusive license of existing LLM technology. This agreement will provide Character.AI with additional funding to continue its growth and focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world.
Noam, Daniel, and some members of our research team will also be joining Google. Most of Character.AI's talented team members will remain with the company to continue building Character.AI products and serving our growing user base.
Dominic Perella, Character.AI's General Counsel, has assumed the role of Interim Chief Executive Officer. Perella was previously a longtime executive at Snap Inc. and has been a member of Character.AI's core leadership team since mid-2023. These changes will be effective immediately.
As we move into our next phase of growth, we will continue to invest in our post-training capabilities, flexibly using our own or externally available large language models. We are excited about the future of Character.AI and are committed to serving our users with innovative products.
We couldn't be more grateful to Noam, Daniel, and the rest of the team for bringing Character.AI from a dream to a reality. We look forward to building on their already contributions Character.AI as they continue to sail in the next phase of growth."
While technically, the company's stake has not changed hands, Google pays its equity value to Character.AI investors at a valuation of $2.5 billion.
According to sources, Character.AI's employees will also receive cash at that valuation based on their vested shares, and they will also be paid out as their existing shares are vested.
Character.AI previously raised $193 million in venture capital from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, and its last known valuation was $1 billion. The company has also said in talks that it wants to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from Google.
This agreement is similar to the agreements that Microsoft, Amazon, and others have reached with startups in the past few months. These agreements are under review by regulators. Tech giants are pouring billions of dollars into enhancing their AI infrastructure and hiring the best researchers from startups.
In March, Microsoft paid $650 million to bring in the co-founders and dozens of employees of AI startup Inflection. Former Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman, has become Microsoft's executive vice president and CEO of the newly formed Microsoft AI organization.
Former Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman.
Similarly, in June, Amazon hired co-founders and employees from another AI startup, Adobe.
The strategy of recruiting talent from AI startups to expand their wings and empower business redevelopment is already taking shape. Big Tech's cannibalization of AI startups may have just begun.
Reference Links:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/2/24212348/google-hires-character-ai-noam-shazeer
https://blog.character.ai/our-next-phase-of-growth/
This article is from Xinzhi self-media and does not represent the views and positions of Business Xinzhi.If there is any suspicion of infringement, please contact the administrator of the Business News Platform.Contact: system@shangyexinzhi.com