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☆ OpenAI is showing that the AI race is survival of the richest
▼ + stars: | 2024-09-12 | by ( Hasan Chowdhury | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

It's also a sign of just how expensive the business of training and running AI models is getting. AdvertisementGenerative AI is a cash-guzzlerStartups like OpenAI need to raise huge amounts of capital to build smarter AI models. Just look at the spending of Big Tech firms working to improve their AI models. Consolidation has struck the AI industry in recent months, as some top startups trying to build AI models have been gutted. AI startups serious about progressing on LLMs will need to figure out the answer to this pretty quickly.

Persons: —, Elon, Sam Altman, ChatGPT, It's, Justin Sullivan, OpenAI, Dario Amodei, Anthropic, Pretty, Amodei's Anthropic, Dario Amodei's Anthropic, Noam Shazeer —, Ben Bergman, Sri Muppidi, it's, Elad Gil, Gil Organizations: Service, Bloomberg, Business, SpaceX, Getty, Microsoft, Big Tech, Street, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Google Locations: OpenAI, aren't

☆ 'These are not normal;' A new type of dealmaking for AI startups is rattling Silicon Valley
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-10 | by ( Ben Bergman | Sri Muppidi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Google unnerved Silicon Valley last week when it agreed to pay $2.5 billion to license Character.AI's technology, hire its two superstar cofounders and 20 percent of employees. The deal came after AI developers Adept and Inflection both effectively sold themselves to Amazon and Microsoft, respectively, in recent months. It was only last year Character.AI raised $150 million in venture funding, which valued the company at $850 million. Its appeal as a chatbot that uses AI to make virtual characters that interact with users seems decidedly niche. Related storiesMost of the founders and investors Business Insider spoke to for this story say Google has little interest in Character.AI's actual product.

Persons: cofounders, Brent Queener, Kyle Sanford, Character.AI, Iris Sun, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Jack Selby, Peter Thiel's, Steve Brotman, Shazeer, De Freitas, PitchBook's Sanford, they're, Roy Bahat, Arvind Jain, Cameron Lester, Lester Organizations: Service, Microsoft, Bonfire Ventures, Business, Apple, Big Tech, AZ, Biden Administration, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice, Alpha Partners, FTC, DOJ, New York Times, Google, Madrona Venture, Bloomberg Beta, Jefferies

☆ The New A.I. Deal: Buy Everything but the Company
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-08 | by ( Erin Griffith | Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Last week, Mr. Shazeer and Mr. De Freitas announced that they were returning to Google. research arm, along with roughly 20 percent of Character.AI’s employees, and provide their start-up’s technology, they said. Instead, Google agreed to pay $3 billion to license the technology, two people with knowledge of the deal said. About $2.5 billion of that sum will then be used to buy out Character.AI’s shareholders, including Mr. Shazeer, who owns 30 percent to 40 percent of the company and stands to net $750 million to $1 billion, the people said. While big tech companies typically buy start-ups outright, they have turned to a more complicated deal structure for young A.I.

Persons: Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Shazeer, De Freitas, Character.AI Organizations: Google Locations: Silicon Valley

☆ Ex-Google engineers who founded Character.AI rejoin company with new AI partnership
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-02 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

"I am super excited to return to Google and work as part of the Google DeepMind team," Shazeer said in a statement on Friday. I am confident that the funds from the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement together with the incredible Character.AI team positions Character.AI for continued success in the future." The move also comes amid a competitive talent and AI landscape, leading companies to form partnerships against a tough regulatory landscape that has placed scrutiny on mergers and acquisitions. Britain's competition watchdog said earlier this week it is looking into Google's partnership with AI startup Anthropic, for example. In March, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of AI startup DeepMind that Google acquired in 2014, and much of its staff to lead AI initiatives.

Persons: Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI, Freitas, Axios, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Shazeer, We're, Noam, Mustafa Suleyman, Suleyman, Satya Nadella Organizations: Google, Character.AI, CNBC, Microsoft Locations: Character.AI

☆ AI pioneer Illia Polosukhin, one of Google's 'Transformer 8,' wants to democratize artificial intelligence
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-27 | by ( Katie Tarasov | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Before Illia Polosukhin left Google in 2017, he had a brainstorming lunch and then returned to his desk to build what may have been the very first transformer, the neural network architecture that makes generative artificial intelligence possible. Seven of the "Transformer 8" joined Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at GTC, Nvidia's annual developer conference in San Jose on March 20, 2024. From left to right: Lukasz Kaiser, Noam Shazeer, Aidan Gomez, Jensen Huang, Llion Jones, Jakob Uszkoreit, Ashish Vaswani and Illia Polosukhin. All eight of the authors have now left Google, although Polosukhin was the first to depart. Watch the video to hear the full conversation between CNBC's Katie tarasov and and Illia Polosukhin.

Persons: Polosukhin, Jensen Huang, Illia Polosukhin, Lukasz Kaiser, Noam Shazeer, Aidan Gomez, Llion Jones, Jakob Uszkoreit, Ashish Vaswani, OpenAI, Alexander Skidanov, CNBC's Katie tarasov, Illia Organizations: Nvidia, Google, CNBC Locations: San Jose

Google and Character AI did not respond to requests for comment. The demographic is helping the company position itself as the purveyor of more fun personal AI companions, compared to other AI chatbots from OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. Character.AI is also in talks to raise equity funding from venture capital investors, which could value the company at over $5 billion, sources said. The talks with Google are ongoing and terms of the deal could change, said the sources, who requested anonymity as the discussions are private. Anthropic uses Google's cloud services as well as its latest version of TPUs.

Persons: Character.AI, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Billie Eilish, Character.AI's, Google's Bard, Andreessen Horowitz, Lina Khan, Krystal Hu, Anna Tong, Jeffrey Dastin, Bill Berkrot Organizations: Google, Reuters, Microsoft, . Federal Trade Commission, Thomson Locations: OpenAI, ., San Francisco, New York

☆ Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer on future of AI
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-07 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: 1 min

Share Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via EmailCharacter.AI CEO Noam Shazeer on future of AICharacter.AI founder and CEO Noam Shazeer joins 'The Exchange' to discuss AI's impact on the mega caps and more.

Persons: Noam Shazeer

Aug 17 (Reuters) - Two prominent former Google (GOOGL.O) researchers, one of whom was a co-inventor of the “transformer” artificial intelligence architecture that paved the way for the generative AI boom, announced on Thursday they had started a new AI company based in Tokyo. Sakana AI, founded by David Ha and Llion Jones, declined to disclose funding details. Ha was previously the head of research at Stability AI and a Google Brain researcher. After the famous paper came out, advances in generative AI foundation models have centered around making the “transformer”-based models larger and larger. Instead of doing that, Sakana AI will focus on creating new architectures for foundation models, Jones told Reuters.

Persons: David Ha, Llion Jones, Jones, Ha, “, ”, Noam Shazeer, Aidan Gomez, Anna Tong, Frances Kerry Organizations: Google, Reuters, Thomson Locations: Tokyo, San Francisco

☆ Google's top AI researchers, including all the authors behind a landmark paper, have left for competitors. Here's where they are now.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-13 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

Top AI researchers have been leaving for startups where their work can have more impact. That frustration over Google's slow movement has been corroborated by other former Google researchers who spoke to Insider. Niki Parmar left Google Brain after five years to serve as a cofounder and CTO of Adept, though in November, she left to found a stealth startup. Lukasz Kaiser left Google Brain after working there for more than seven years to join OpenAI in 2021. Sharan Narang, another contributor to the T5 paper, left Google Brain in 2022 after four years there.

Persons: it's, Llion Jones, OpenAI's, ChatGPT, Sundar Pichai, Bard, Daniel De Freitas, Noam Shazeer, Ilya Sutskever, Sutskever, OpenAI, Ashish Vaswani, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, Lukasz Kaiser, Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, Meena, De Freitas, Romal Thoppilan, Character.AI, LaMDA, Elon Musk, Character.ai, Winni Wintermeyer, Thoppilan, Alicia Jin, BERT BERT, BERT, Jacob Devlin, Colin Raffel, Raffel, Sharan Narang, He's, Azalia Mirhoseini, Anna Goldie, Mirhoseini, Goldie, Claude, DeepMind Mustafa Suleyman, Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind, Suleyman, Reid Hoffman Organizations: Google, Bloomberg, New York Times, Microsoft, Street Journal, Neural Networks, OpenAI, YouTube, Elon, UNC Chapel Hill, Meta, Anthropic, Society Locations: ChatGPT, Character.AI, DeepMind

☆ Millions of users are flocking to an AI-powered chatbot that lets them chat with famous figures like Elon Musk and Mario
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-13 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Character.AI lets users chat with and create bots based on famous figures throughout history. The app had been downloaded more than 5 million times, according to Bloomberg. Popular figures on the platform include Mario, Elon Musk, and Albert Einstein. One platform, Character.AI, says it's doing things differently from its competitors. For one thing, instead of delivering responses in a consistent voice or a set of pre-programmed personas, users can converse with and create chatbots based on famous figures throughout history.

Persons: Character.AI, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, Daniel De Freitas, Noam Shazeer, Mario, Micheal Jackson, Tony Stark, Socrates Organizations: Bloomberg, Mario, ChatGPT, Google, Nintendo

☆ Google quietly ditched plans for an AI-powered chatbot app for Gen Z
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-11 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Google was working on an AI-powered mobile chatbot app for Gen Z users that features interactive digital characters, CNBC has learned. However, the company recently "deprioritized" those efforts amid an internal reorganization, according to materials seen by CNBC. Typically, when a product is deprioritized at Google, work on it ceases. Called "Bubble Characters," the app featured a choice of a talking digital character that would interact in conversations with Gen Z users, according to internal documentation viewed by CNBC. The Gen Z chatbot was one among a range of AI-powered projects using Google's large language models in the last several months.

Persons: Gen, chatbot, Bard, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Andreessen Horowitz Organizations: Google, CNBC

May 4 (Reuters) - Two prominent former Google (GOOGL.O) researchers who authored the groundbreaking paper that paved the way for the generative AI boom, have raised $8 million for their new startup Essential AI, four sources told Reuters. Thrive Capital had led the round in Essential AI, founded by Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar. Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, is also an investor in Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Essential AI aims to build software for enterprises to use large language models, the core software of a new artificial intelligence system that has powered generative AI applications such as ChatGPT, sources said. The raise came after Vaswani and Parmar left Adept AI, a company they also co-founded in 2021 with former Google director David Luan.

☆ A former Google researcher behind a seminal AI paper describes how the company lost a top chatbot visionary
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer, a former Googler who worked in AI, spoke to the "No Priors" podcast. He says Google was afraid to launch a chatbot, fearing consequences of it saying something wrong. Like the chatbot ChatGPT, Character.ai's technology leans on a vast amount of text-based information scraped from the web for its knowledge. Shazeer was a lead author on Google's Transformer paper, which has been widely cited as key to today's chatbots. Google had also received pushback internally from AI researchers like Timnit Gebru who cautioned against releasing anything that might cause harm.

March 23 (Reuters) - Character.AI has raised $150 million in a new funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz that valued the AI chatbot startup at $1 billion, and it's in talks with cloud providers for more strategic investment, the company told Reuters. The billion-dollar valuation for a company with zero revenue is another example of the continued AI funding boom since OpenAI's ChatGPT became a widely recognized name. AI investment in 2023 to date has surpassed the full-year amount in 2020 of $1.5 billion, according to PitchBook data. While not currently generating any revenue, Character.AI plans to launch a paid subscription "in the not distant future", while keeping the current free version available, Shazeer said. Founded in 2021 by former Google researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI had attracted backers including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

☆ Google's AI teams are experiencing a brain drain. Here's where its top researchers are now.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +12 min

Top AI researchers have been leaving for startups where their work can have more impact. That frustration over Google's slow movement has been corroborated by other former Google researchers who spoke to Insider. Niki Parmar left Google Brain after five years to serve as a co-founder and CTO of Adept, though like Vaswani she recently left for a stealth startup. Lukasz Kaiser left Google Brain after over seven years to join OpenAI in 2021. Sharan Narang, another contributor to the T5 paper, left Google Brain in 2022 after four years.

☆ Ex-Google employees' A.I. chatbot startup valued at $1 billion after Andreessen Horowitz funding
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

Character.AI, an artificial intelligence start-up founded by two former Google employees, is capitalizing on venture capitalists' unquenchable thirst for deals in technology's hottest space. The two-year-old company said on Thursday that it raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz has been a significant player in driving up prices in both markets. The firm announced a $4.5 billion crypto fund in mid-2022 as the digital currency market was in freefall. A year earlier, it added to its investment in audio app Clubhouse, valuing the early-stage startup at $4 billion.

☆ Two Google engineers built a ChatGPT-like AI chatbot years ago, but execs reportedly shut it down due to safety concerns
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-08 | by ( Aaron Mok | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Ex-Google engineers developed a conversational AI chatbot years ago, per The Wall Street Journal. Google is now racing to catch up with Microsoft's AI and plans to release its AI chatbot this year. "It caused a bit of a stir inside of Google," Shazeer said in an interview with investors Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan last month. But Google's AI plans may now finally see the light of day, even as discussions around whether its chatbot can be responsibly launched continue. Alphabet chairman John Hennessy agreed that Google's chatbot wasn't "really ready for a product yet."

☆ How Google Became Cautious of AI and Gave Microsoft an Opening
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-07 | by ( Miles Kruppa | Sam Schechner | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

More than two years ago, a pair of Google researchers started pushing the company to release a chatbot built on technology more powerful than anything else available at the time. The conversational computer program they had developed could confidently debate philosophy and banter about its favorite TV shows, while improvising puns about cows and horses. The researchers, Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer , told colleagues that chatbots like theirs, supercharged by recent advances in artificial intelligence, would revolutionize the way people searched the internet and interacted with computers, according to people who heard the remarks.

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