- Google is in discussions with Character.AI, the AI startup, to invest hundreds of millions of dollars.
- It will be the newest AI investment by the tech giant, following the $2 billion investment in Anthropic in October 2023.
Google is looking to further broaden its artificial intelligence portfolio through additional investments in AI chatbot developer Character.AI. The investment, possibly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, will likely be used to develop new chatbot models. The deal comes soon after a $2 billion investment by Google in Anthropic.
The deal, primarily expected to be used as convertible notes, will strengthen the existing partnership between the two companies if it goes through. Character AI already uses Google’s cloud services and tensor processing units for its AI training operations.
Character.AI was founded by veterans from Google’s DeepMind project and is known for its chatbots that mimic characteristics of historical personalities and other famous fictional characters. It is highly popular for the consumer demographic of the age between 18 and 24. The startup has raised a $150 million investment earlier this year. Now, the company is also looking for investments in exchange for equity that will put the value of Character.AI at $5 billion.
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The partnership between Character.AI and Google was initiated in May 2023 and was used to set up the AI startup’s core infrastructure. It also set up the use of Google’s Google Cloud Spanner, which was used to reach several petaflops of performance in the following months.
The upcoming deal is following an overall trend of Big Tech companies looking for significant stakes in emerging artificial intelligence companies in a heated race that started following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.
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