AIster · The model wars · M&A & deals
Google licenses Character.AI and rehires its founders
A licence deal reportedly worth $2.7 billion brings Noam Shazeer back to Google
Key facts
- Date
- 2 Aug 2024
- Era
- The model wars
- Interest
- M&A & deals
- Threads
- Labs & people
- Who
- Google, Character.AI
- People
- Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas
- Amount
- About $2.7B, as reported by the Wall Street Journal in Sep 2024
Character.AI gave Google a non-exclusive licence to its language model technology, and its co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, both former Googlers, rejoined Google with part of the research team. The Wall Street Journal later reported the deal was worth about $2.7 billion.
Sources
- CNBC, Ex-Google engineers from Character.AI rejoin company with AI partnership, 2024-08-02
- TechCrunch, Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer returns to Google, 2024-08-02
- Business Insider (via Yahoo Tech), Google's reported $2.7 billion deal to bring back a former employee is proof AI geniuses are the new 'star quarterbacks', 2024-09-27