Noam Shazeer, the co-founder and CEO of Character.AI is joining Google DeepMind, along with several other employees from the generative AI chatbot startup.
At the same time as hiring Shazeer, Google has signed a non-exclusive agreement with Character.AI to use its technology.
“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,” Google said in a statement.
“This agreement will provide increased funding for Character.AI to continue growing and to focus on building personalized AI products for users around the world."
Character.AI has raised over $150 million in funding, primarily from Andreessen Horowitz.
The hiring and licensing comes despite increasing regulatory scrutiny on tech giants' control over generative AI. The FTC is looking into Microsoft and OpenAI, alongside Amazon and Alphabet's relationship with Anthropic.
Microsoft in March hired much of Inflection AI, and has taken a stake in Mistral AI. The latter deal is being investigated by the European Commission.
