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For Reported $2.5B, Google Brings Top Character.AI Researchers Back into Its Fold
Google defectors Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas are leaving Character.AI, the artificial general intelligence (AGI) company they co-founded in 2021, to return to Google.
Making the move with them are "certain members" of Character.AI's research team, according to a Character.AI blog post last Friday.
In turn, Google is paying Character.AI for a non-exclusive license to use the startup's chatbot technology. Character.AI will use Google's license payment to fund the development of its "personalized superintelligence" AI products.
The Character.AI blog was light on specifics, but The Information on Monday reported that the licensing agreement will cost Google $2.5 billion. The Verge, meanwhile, put the number of Character.AI researchers being poached by Google at about 30.
The moves are effective immediately.
The deal is the latest in a trend of high-profile AI "acqui-hires" this year. In March, Microsoft hired multiple high-level personnel from Inflection AI and paid a reported $650 million to license its models. More recently, Amazon poached several executives from AGI startup Adept and signed a licensing agreement for an undisclosed amount.
Such deals are effectively acquisitions in all but name, structured to avoid potentially onerous antitrust investigations by regulatory agencies. (However, in the Microsoft-Inflection case, U.S. competition watchdogs did eventually launch an inquiry.)
The return of Shazeer and De Freitas is a win for Google's AI bona fides. Before co-founding Character.AI, the two worked at Google as the lead researchers of LaMDA, the chatbot technology that made waves a few years ago when a Google engineer claimed it had become sentient.
According to reports, Shazeer -- who also trailblazed research into the kinds of deep learning transformer models that now underpin technologies like ChatGPT -- and De Freitas left Google in 2021 after the company rejected their proposals to make LaMDA more widely available. They went on to start Character.AI, with Shazeer as its CEO and De Freitas its president.
After the Google acqui-hires, Character.AI is left with about 140 employees, per The Verge, led by interim CEO and Character.Al General Counsel Dominic Perella. Going forward, the company will focus on "post-training capabilities."