Google’s aces up its sleeve with Character.AI in the race for artificial intelligence

30 December 20234 months ago babelfish

Chatting with Elon Musk, Leo Messi or William Shakespeare thanks to the artificial intelligence of Character.AI is already a reality and Google would be ready to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in it, challenging Microsoft and its partnership with OpenAI. All the details

Microsoft finances OpenAI, a pioneer in generative artificial intelligence with its ChatGpt, and Google, which cannot stand by and seems to want to focus on the startup Character.AI, which develops a free version of various chatbots that replicate famous people.

WHAT CHARACTER.AI DOES AND WHO IS BEHIND IT

Character.AI is an artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded in 2021 in Menlo Park, California by former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas. To train its models it uses hardware and software solutions from Big G that allow users to develop customized chatbots – what rival ChatGpt is now starting to do .

The service is currently free but with a $9.99 per month subscription you can skip the waiting queues that are created to manage peak demand situations.

However, what Character.AI is already known for are its free chatbots in the guise of famous people with whom you can chat in various languages, including Italian: from Elon Musk to Super Mario via the late Michael Jackson, but also the eight-time Ballon d'Or winner Leo Messi and, for the more intellectual, there are historical figures such as William Shakespeare and Sigmund Freud. Idea also copied from Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and reported by Character.AI on X.

CHARACTER.AI'S WINNING CARD

Precisely this invention, launched last September, could be one of Character.AI's aces up its sleeve because, as Reuters writes, its chatbots are having a certain success among younger people (18-24 years), who make up the 60 % of all web traffic obtained by the startup. And for Similarweb, a data analytics company, it has a base of 4 million monthly active users .

But in addition to famous people, Character.AI also offers, among its 18 million chatbots, various figures, such as an English teacher able to provide help with grammar or a psychologist to receive support and recently declared that in August the platform's users spent an average of two hours a day with its chatbots.

Part of the company's explanation, Quartz reports, is that "people interact with different characters, which is more engaging than passively scrolling through a site." Additionally, it also recently launched a paid feature that allows people to group chat with up to five AI and five human characters at the same time.

It will be for all these reasons that Character.AI has so far raised 190 million dollars in funding from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Greycroft and that now Google is also considering investing "hundreds of millions of dollars", says Reuters .

The financing received, among other things, has already enabled it to reach a market valuation of one billion dollars and could even reach over 5 billion dollars.

GOOGLE'S INTENTIONS WITH CHARACTER.AI

According to Reuters, Google has set its sights on this promising startup and the investment, which “could be structured in the form of convertible bonds, will deepen the existing partnership between Character.AI and Google, in which it uses cloud services and Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPU) to train models."

Google, the news agency recalls, has already invested in AI startups, including $2 billion for model maker Anthropic in the form of convertible notes, in addition to its previous equity investment.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/gli-assi-nella-manica-di-google-con-character-ai-nella-corsa-allintelligenza-artificiale/ on Sat, 30 Dec 2023 07:09:04 +0000.