Google hires top start-up team, fueling concerns over Big Tech’s power in AI

SAN FRANCISCO Google hired the co founders of Character.ai, a prominent artificial intelligence start up whose personalised chatbots were popular am...

SAN FRANCISCO - Google hired the co-founders of Character.ai, a prominent artificial intelligence start-up whose personalised chatbots were popular among young people, reigniting concerns that even well-funded start-ups can’t compete with the dominant tech companies that hold sway over the technology expected to rewire work and play.

Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, two highly respected AI researchers, left Google in 2022 to start Character and in March last year the company was valued by investors at $1bn.

They will now return to Google, along with some of their employees, the start-up said in a blog post Friday, and Google will pay Character to access its AI technology.

The start-up will in the future tap AI systems developed by other companies in addition to its own.

The deal is strikingly similar to two others that have received scrutiny from regulators for potentially skirting antitrust laws. In March, Microsoft hired away the head of Inflection AI, another chatbot start-up that had received substantial funding, and agreed to pay the company for its technology. In June, Amazon announced a similar arrangement with Adept AI, a start-up founded by former Google and OpenAI engineer David Luan. Google and Character declined to comment on the terms of their deal.