Google's investment may be structured as a convertible bond. Character.AI is also using the search giant's cloud services and Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) for AI tasks.
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| Character.AI’s website is currently in beta. Users can interact with celebrity and animated versions of AI chatbots, or even create their own tailored AI chatbot. |
Character.AI was founded by former Googlers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas. The company specializes in developing virtual versions of celebrities or anime characters to interact with users.
This AI startup's app can be provided for free, but customers can pay extra ($9.99/month) to directly access the chatbot.
Character.AI’s chatbots, which come in a variety of colors and roles, are popular with users aged 18 to 24, according to data from Similarweb. This age group contributes to 60% of the site’s traffic.
Character.AI is taking a demographic-based approach to building virtual assistants, positioning its personalized chatbots as more interesting than OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard. The company also said its website attracted 100 million monthly visits in the first six months since its launch.
Additionally, some sources said that Character.AI is also negotiating to raise equity capital from venture capitalists, which could value the company at more than $5 billion.
In addition to Character.AI, Google is also investing in another potential AI startup, Anthropic, in the form of convertible bonds worth $2 billion, plus a previous equity investment.
Anthropic is currently using Google's cloud services as well as the latest version of TPU.
It's part of a recent trend in which major tech cloud providers sign contracts with AI companies to entice them to use certain clouds or hardware, in a fierce race to meet consumer demand.
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