Character

Character.AI, legally known as Character Technologies, Inc., operates an AI-powered platform that enables users to create and interact with customizable AI chatbots. The company was founded in November 2021 by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, both former senior engineers from Google's AI division. The founders' journey is deeply rooted in their extensive work on large language models (LLMs); Shazeer was a lead author of the influential 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the transformer architecture foundational to modern AI, while De Freitas was instrumental in developing Google's LaMDA chatbot. Their departure from Google was reportedly prompted by the tech giant's refusal to release a chatbot named Meena, which they had developed.

Based in Menlo Park, California, Character.AI provides a platform where users can interact with AI personas based on historical figures, celebrities, or fictional characters, as well as create their own original characters with specific personalities and parameters. The service is designed for a variety of applications, including entertainment, brainstorming, language learning, and playing text-based adventure games. The platform's core offering allows for open-ended, real-time conversations, with features like group chats where multiple users and AI characters can interact simultaneously. The technology leverages advanced natural language processing to deliver realistic and coherent conversations, with the AI learning and adapting from user interactions to improve its responses over time.

The company operates on a freemium business model. A significant portion of its platform is accessible for free, a strategy aimed at fostering a large and engaged user community. Revenue is generated primarily through a premium subscription plan called c.ai+, launched in May 2023 for $9.99 per month. This subscription offers users benefits such as faster message generation, priority access to the platform, and early access to new features. Character.AI has successfully attracted substantial investment, raising a total of $193 million over two funding rounds, including a $150 million Series A round in March 2023 led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which valued the company at $1 billion. In August 2024, the founders, Shazeer and De Freitas, returned to Google in a deal that included a non-exclusive licensing agreement for Google to use Character.AI's technology, with Dominic Perella appointed as interim CEO.

Keywords: conversational AI, AI chatbots, character creation, natural language processing, large language models, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Andreessen Horowitz, generative AI, AI companionship, interactive storytelling, text-based games, user-generated content, freemium model, AI entertainment, virtual characters, AI personas, machine learning, dialog agents, AI platform, subscription model, language learning AI, creative writing tool, AI role-playing