Exclusive: Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer returns to Google as the tech giant invests in the AI company

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the return of Noam Shazeer, the co-founder and CEO of Character.AI, to Google after leaving the company in 2021 to found the startup. It also mentions that Daniel De Freitas, another Character.AI co-founder, is joining Google along with some other employees, while Dominic Perella, the company's general counsel, is becoming the interim CEO. The article also mentions that Google is signing a non-exclusive agreement with Character.AI to use its technology.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Noam Shazeer's return to Google

1. What was Noam Shazeer's previous role at Google? Noam Shazeer previously spearheaded the team of researchers that built LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a language model used for conversational AI tools, during his previous stint at Google.

2. What is Noam Shazeer's new role at Google? Noam Shazeer is joining the Google DeepMind research team, but his exact role is not specified.

3. What is the reason for Noam Shazeer's return to Google? Noam Shazeer is excited to return to Google and work as part of the Google DeepMind team.

[02] Character.AI's changes

1. Who is becoming the interim CEO of Character.AI? Dominic Perella, Character.AI's general counsel, is becoming the interim CEO of the startup.

2. What is the status of the rest of the Character.AI team? The article mentions that most of the staff is staying at Character.AI.

3. What is the agreement between Google and Character.AI? Google is signing a non-exclusive agreement with Character.AI to use its technology, which will provide increased funding for Character.AI to continue growing and focus on building personalized AI products.

4. What is the reason for the changes at Character.AI? According to the article, the landscape has shifted, and many more pre-trained models are now available, so Character.AI sees an advantage in making greater use of third-party LLMs alongside its own, allowing it to devote more resources to post-training and creating new product experiences for its growing user base.

[03] Regulatory scrutiny

1. What are the concerns regarding regulatory scrutiny? There is a possibility that different regulatory bodies, such as the FTC and DoJ in the U.S. and the EU, will scrutinize these reverse acqui-hires closely, as they have done with similar cases like Microsoft's hiring of key people from Inflection AI.