Ex-Google engineers who founded Character.AI rejoin company with new AI partnership

Founders of one of the hottest artificial intelligence startups Character.AI are rejoining Google along with other team members.

Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, in addition to certain members of Character.AI's research team, are joining Google's AI unit DeepMind, the companies said Friday. 

Character.AI uses large language models to allow users to create chatbots and interact with those created by other users. The startup reached a $1 billion valuation as the AI boom began last year. Character.AI did not generate revenue then but said it was considering offering a subscription service in the future.

The two founders left Google in 2021 after the search giant reportedly rebuffed their attempts to try and get Google to push a chatbot forward. They went on to start Character.AI that same year.

Freitas criticized the company's slow-moving pace, telling Axios last March, "There are some overlaps, but we're confident Google will never do anything fun," regarding the Bard, which is now Gemini chatbot.

Character.AI will provide Google with a nonexclusive license for its current large language model, or LLM, technology, the company's blog post states. "This agreement will provide increased funding for Character.AI to continue growing and to focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world," it states.

"Over the past two years, however, the landscape has shifted — many more pre-trained models are now available," the blog post continues. "Given these changes, we see an advantage in making greater use of third-party LLMs alongside our own. This allows us to devote even more resources to post-training and creating new product experiences for our growing user base."

Alphabet, facing criticism of getting beat to the