Noam Shazier, co-founder and CEO of Character.AI, is returning to Google in a big move after leaving the company in October 2021 to found an a16z-backed startup. In his previous role, Shazier led the team of researchers that developed LaMDA (Language Model for Conversational Applications), a language model used in conversational AI tools.
Character.AI co-founder Daniel de Freitas will also join Google, along with other employees from the startup. Character.AI's general counsel Dominic Perera will serve as the startup's interim CEO. The company said the majority of its staff will remain with Character.AI.
Google has also signed a non-exclusive deal with Character.AI to use its technology.
“I am excited to return to Google and be part of the Google DeepMind team. I am proud of all we have built at Character.AI over the past three years, and I am confident that the funding from our non-exclusive Google license agreement and the amazing Character.AI team will position Character.AI for continued success,” Shazeer said in a statement to TechCrunch.
“We're particularly pleased to welcome Noam, a preeminent machine learning researcher, along with several of his colleagues to the Google DeepMind research team,” Google said in a statement. “This agreement provides Character.AI with additional funding to continue growing and focusing on building personalized AI products for users around the world.”
Character.AI has raised over $150 million in funding, primarily from a16z.
“When Noam and Daniel launched Character.AI, their goal of personalized superintelligence required a full-stack approach: they needed to pre-train models, post-train to power the experiences that make Character.AI special, and build a product platform that could reach users around the world,” Character AI said in a blog announcing the move.
“However, things have changed over the past two years, and many more pre-trained models are now available. Given these changes, we see an advantage in leveraging third-party LLMs more in parallel with our own LLMs, allowing us to devote more resources to post-training work and creating new product experiences for our growing user base.”