• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 2, 2024

Character.AI co-founder and CEO Noam Shazeer will return to Google after leaving the company in October 2021 to create a startup that X owner Elon Musk had been rumored to want. 

Shazeer had spearheaded the team of researchers that built Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), which supports Google's family of conversational large language models (LLMs).

Earlier this week, Musk wrote on X that his AI startup xAI was not considering an acquisition of Character.AI, an app that allows users to chat with an AI version of characters, despite some media reports.

Interestingly, Shazeer is not the only Chararacter.AI executive leaving. Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI co-founder, also will join Google with some other employees from the startup.

Dominic Perella, Character.AI’s general counsel, is becoming an interim CEO at the startup, the company announced in a blog post on Friday.

Perella had spent years at Snap and has been part of Character.AI’s core leadership team since mid-2023. These changes go into effect immediately. 

Character.AI also disclosed entering into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Google for Character.AI's current LLM technology. Google reportedly been investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Character even as it invests billions into AI startup Anthropic and its own technologies.

Despite the exodus of top executives, most employees will remain at Character.AI, the company said.

When Shazeer and De Freitas co-founded Character.AI, the goal of creating a company based on personalized superintelligence required a full stack approach.

“We had to pre-train models, post-train them to power the experiences that make Character.AI special, and build a product platform with the ability to reach users globally,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Over the past two years, however, the landscape has shifted – many more pre-trained models are now available.”

The changes enable the company to take advantage of third-party LLMs alongside its own. This allows Character.AI to devote more resources to post-training and creating new product experiences for its growing user base.

Based on open jobs listed on its website, the company continues to operate, and perhaps even grow. Listings include head of content policy, brand designer, staff security engineer for privacy, research engineer and many others. In fact, about 35 jobs are listed on the company’s website.

Update: The article was updated to reflect the licensing deal.