STARTUP Character.AI said on Friday it has signed an agreement with Alphabet's Google that grants the search engine giant a non-exclusive license to the chatbot maker's large language model technology.The deal, echoing ones struck by Microsoft and Amazon in the past few months, will see Character.AI co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas rejoin Google, where they were formerly employees.
AI's general counsel, will become its interim chief executive officer, effective immediately.'We're particularly thrilled to welcome back Noam, a preeminent researcher in machine learning, who is joining Google DeepMind's research team, along with a small number of his colleagues,' a Google spokesman said in an email.In March, Microsoft paid $650 million to bring on the cofounders and dozens of staff from AI startup Inflection.