Character.AI, the chatbot platform that allows users to converse with celebrity or well-known persona-like agents, has announced a change in management. Co-founded by former Google employees Noam Shazeer (CEO) and Daniel De Freitas, they will return to work at Google, taking some employees with them.
This return to Google is part of an agreement where Google will pay licensing fees to use Character.AI for developing non-exclusionary LLM models. The team from Character.AI moving to Google will join the DeepMind team.
In the past, the company developed Full Stack chatbots, encompassing both pre-trained and post-trained models. However, in the rapidly evolving AI landscape over the past two years, there has been a shift towards utilizing more externally developed pre-trained models. As a result, the company has decided to focus on post-trained models, catering more to user-facing services.
Despite this change, most of the employees at Character.AI will continue working as usual, with Dominic Perella, the company’s head of legal, serving as interim CEO.
Source: Character.AI and TechCrunch
TLDR: Co-founders of Character.AI are returning to Google, with some employees, as part of a deal for Google to pay licensing fees for using Character.AI for developing non-exclusionary LLM models. The company will now focus more on post-trained models for user-facing services.
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