Google Hires Character.AI Cofounders and Licenses Its Models

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has agreed to pay a licensing fee [non-paywalled link] to chatbot maker Character.AI for its models and will hire its cofounders and many of its researchers, Character's leaders told staff on Friday. The leaders told Character staff that investors would be bought out at a valuation of about $88 per share, the leaders said in a meeting. That's about 2.5 times the value of shares in Character's 2023 Series A, which valued the company at $1 billion, they said.

The Character employees joining Google will work on its Gemini AI efforts, they said. Character will switch to open-source models such as Meta Platforms' Llama 3.1 to power its products, rather than its in-house models, they said. The deal follows a string of similar arrangements by other well-funded artificial intelligence startups. AI developers Adept and Inflection have both effectively sold themselves to Amazon and Microsoft, respectively, in the last five months despite raising considerable capital.

Cool story

[byronivs]

Crickets. Hey google you gonna shut that? It's been a minute.

The desperation is rising

[gweihir]

This is obviously a panic-buy.

Re:

[SpinyNorman]

Panic buy, or panic sell?

I'm slightly surprised nobody is commenting on this story.

Noam Shazeer IMO is the key figure here - he was the one who (when previously at Google) took the idea of self-attention and parallel processing and eventually translated this into the Transformer architecture that outperformed other contemporary seq2seq approaches such as convolution (post LSTM), thereby kicking of the current LLM/AI era.

There was a recent publication from Shazeer describing some of his Transformer optimizat