Noam Shazeer, co-founder and CEO of Character.AI, is rejoining Google after departing the company in October 2021 to establish a chatbot startup backed by a16z. During his previous tenure, Shazeer led the team that developed LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a language model utilized for conversational AI tools. Daniel De Freitas, co-founder of Character.AI, will also transition to Google along with several other employees from the startup. In the interim, Dominic Perella, Character.AI’s general counsel, will serve as the startup's CEO. Character.
AI stated that the majority of its staff will remain with the company. Google has also entered into a non-exclusive agreement with Character.AI to utilize its technology.Expressing his excitement, Shazeer announced, "I am thrilled to rejoin Google and become a part of the Google DeepMind team.
I am immensely proud of our accomplishments at Character.AI over the past three years. With the funds from the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement and the exceptional Character.AI team, I am confident in Character.AI's prospects for continued success in the future," Google mentioned that Shazeer will be joining the DeepMind research team without specifying his or De Freitas's specific roles.
" We are especially pleased to welcome back Noam, a respected machine learning researcher, who is joining Google DeepMind’s research team along with a small group of his colleagues," said Google. A spokesperson from Google stated, "This agreement will provide increased funding for Character.AI to continue expanding and concentrate on developing personalized AI products for users worldwide." Character.AI has secured over $150 million in funding, predominantly from a16z. "When Noam and Daniel founded Character.AI, our objective of personalized superintelligence mandated a comprehensive approach. We needed to pre-train models, post-train them to power the unique experiences that define Character.AI, and develop a product platform capable of reaching users globally," Character AI stated in its blog announcement of the move.
"However, over the past two years, the landscape has changed; numerous pre-trained models are now available. In light of these developments, we see the advantage of utilizing a greater number of third-party LLMs alongside our own. This enables us to dedicate even more resources to post-training and creating new product experiences for our expanding user base."
There is a possibility that various regulatory authorities, such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) in the U.S. and the EU, will closely examine these reverse acqui-hires. The U.K’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently publicized that it is investigating Microsoft's hiring of key personnel from Inflection AI to ascertain whether the tech giant is attempting to evade regulatory oversight. In June, the FTC initiated a similar investigation into Microsoft’s $650 million deal.