Character.AI Founders Rejoin Google With A New Ai Partnership

The founders of Character.AI, a leading artificial intelligence (AI) startup, is returning to Google through a new partnership. Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, along with select members of Character.AI’s research team are joining Google’s DeepMind unit, as announced on Friday.

Shazeer and De Freitas left Google in 2021 when their proposal to progress a chatbot project was turned down by the firm. After that, they introduced Character.AI. Previously, De Freitas had criticised Google for moving too quickly and expressed doubts about the company’s capacity for innovation, especially with regard to the Bard chatbot, which is currently known as Gemini.

Alphabet reorganised to increase its market presence in response to accusations that it was falling behind in the competition for AI chatbots. According to reports from the previous year, Google was thinking about making a sizable investment in Character.AI.

A Google spokesperson expressed enthusiasm about Shazeer’s return, highlighting his role as a leading machine learning researcher joining the DeepMind team with a few colleagues.

This development comes as the tech industry faces heightened scrutiny over mergers and acquisitions. For instance, the UK competition watchdog recently began investigating Google’s partnership with AI startup Anthropic. Similarly, Microsoft’s recent hire of Mustafa Suleyman, a DeepMind co-founder, and other staff has also drawn regulatory attention.