PALO ALTO, CA: Tech giant Google is investing significantly in Character.ai, an AI Chatbot startup founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, two former Google employees. 1
Google’s investment is seen as a strategic move to strengthen its position in the AI chatbot market and expand its reach into the growing field of conversational AI.
The company has invested in AI startups in recent years, including a $2 billion investment in Anthropic, another AI chatbot developer.
According to a third source, the investment, potentially structured as convertible notes, will enhance the current collaboration between Character.AI and Google. This partnership involves utilizing Google’s cloud services and Character.AI’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) by Character.AI for training models. Many details are not known. Particularly when Google already has Bard AI.
Investing in Character.ai is also part of a broader trend of tech giants vying for dominance in the AI landscape. Microsoft has also invested significantly in OpenAI, while Amazon has its own AI chatbot platform, Alexa.
As AI technology continues to evolve, the competition between these tech giants is expected to intensify.
The investment, reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is aimed at bolstering Character.ai’s AI model training capabilities and enabling it to compete more effectively with OpenAI, the leading player in the AI chatbot space.
Industry experts say Character.ai has gained popularity for its unique approach to AI chatbots, which allows users to interact with virtual versions of celebrities and fictional characters and create their own personalized chatbots and AI assistants.
This has attracted a significant user base, particularly among younger demographics, and has positioned Character.ai as a potential challenger to OpenAI’s widely popular ChatGPT.
- Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-talks-invest-ai-startup-characterai-sources-2023-11-10/[↩]
