It was previously reported that in order to solve the financial difficulties,Character.ai, a bionic chatbot startupAfter considering discussing cooperation transactions with Google and Meta, it was earlier confirmed that it would sign a non-exclusive licensing cooperation agreement with Google, which would make its natural language model available to Google, and founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas would join Google DeepMind with other team members.
This collaboration also symbolizes that the two founders of Character.ai have returned to the Google system to develop artificial intelligence technology after leaving Google in 2021.
Character.ai is also on the blogExplainIn addition to using its own natural language models, more third-party natural language models will be added in the future to gain more resources to invest in the later training of natural language models and allow users to experience a brand new service experience.
At the same time, the non-exclusive licensing agreement with Google will enable Character.ai to obtain more funds for future development, and the two founders returning to the Google team means that Character.ai will be able to obtain more resources from Google in the future.
Prior to this, Google planned to provide Character.ai with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and adopt investment cooperation to obtain relevant technical resources. Perhaps this was to avoid the current investigation by EU, UK and US agencies, so it replaced acquisition with investment and kept a distance.
On the other hand, if Google were to acquire or merge with an AI company, it would not only face a series of investigations, but would also likely need to implement more complex regulations to ensure the safe operation and use of its services. Therefore, choosing to acquire Character.ai's technical resources through cooperation would be relatively simpler.
Character.ai's market valuation reached $3 billion in March of last year, and it launched a paid subscription plan in May of last year, monetizing its services by charging $10 per month. This has brought its estimated revenue target for this year to $5 million. It has also accumulated more than 9.99 million users worldwide and created more than 1670 million bionic chatbots.
In addition to the investment provided by Google, this cooperation with Google will also enable it to obtain more third-party natural language models, allowing its services to connect with more third-party natural language models to create more application growth opportunities.
