Character Ai is beginning a new chapter with its $2.7 billion license agreement with Google, where CEO Noam Shazeer rejoined the search engine giant.
Erin Teague, a YouTube executive who oversaw the worldwide product management for sports films and television series, was appointed chief product officer.
On next Monday, Teague is set to join Character AI from Google, whom she has been working for since 2016. Furthermore, she was a technical advisor to Search, Ads, Maps, Gemini, Assistant, commerce, and most recently, to payments by SVP.
“Teague is quoted as saying, “Character AI is setting a new bar for how everyday users interact with AI, pioneering personalized and engaging AI experiences at scale.” “I’m excited to use this unique platform to develop and create new features that delight and entertain.”
Shazeer’s return to Google was announced by the company in August. Co-founder Daniel De Freitas joined Google, along with thirty researchers.
Following these exits, the general counsel and interim CEO of Character AI, Dominic Perella, told TechCrunch that the company would now only focus on consumer AI products and not work towards artificial general intelligence, given it has around 100 employees. The majority of Character workers were concerned with pre-training models as was the case with the people who are leaving. Engineering, product, post-training, and tweaking models form the primary areas of concern for AI.
The company’s first significant recruitment was Teague following the move of co-founders to Google. Character Ai mentioned that it would keep on searching for more C-suite leaders as well as a CEO who will take the place of Perella.
Character AI’s product and roadmap
The business is employee-owned and has bought all its investors’ equity. Character shares are not owned by any VCs. AI. A16Z and another employee make up the board.
“I hope to go back to the market and raise capital with a new venture capital partner sometime next year, in order to invest in the business and get more governance, collaboration, and thought leadership,” Perella said.
The number of users every month for Character Ai, which enables users to create and interact with many kinds of AI-powered characters, has doubled annually to over 20 million. There are more than 100 million characters on the site.
The company has made the feature available, in which users can call and speak to AI characters, since June. The company informs that 40% of its users have made at least one call, and it is reported that more than 107 million calls have been made.
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The company added that character of Perella. Even if the AI characters are speaking or texting with humans already, the company is looking for other modalities too.
One of the few reliable sources of income is the service’s $9.99 c.ai+ monthly membership. However, the organisation is now focussing on expansion rather than revenue generating.
Character Ai Perella didn’t say if there was anything specific in the works, but AI said that many businesses have asked the firm to power their characters, and it has investigated some of these relationships.
Different from algorithmic feeds of the previous generation, Perella said, “Our vision is that the next big consumer platform will really be about personalizing your interests.”