Google engineers who founded Character.AI reunite with the company through a new AI collaboration.

• Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, co-founders of Character.AI and former Google engineers, are rejoining Deepmind, Google's AI unit.
• In 2021, two former Google employees founded one of the most successful AI companies.

The founders of Character.AI, one of the most successful AI startups, are rejoining the company along with other team members.

Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, and some members of Character.AI's research team have joined Google's AI unit DeepMind, the companies announced on Friday.

Character.AI utilizes large language models to enable users to create chatbots and engage with those created by others. Despite not generating revenue during the AI boom last year, the startup achieved a $1 billion valuation. Character.AI is currently considering offering a subscription service in the future.

In 2021, the two founders left Google after the search giant rejected their efforts to promote a chatbot. They subsequently established Character.AI that same year.

Freitas criticized the company's slow-moving pace, stating to Axios last March that "There are some overlaps, but we're confident Google will never do anything fun," regarding the Bard—now Gemini chatbot. "Because we worked there."

Character.AI will grant Google a non-exclusive license for its current large language model (LLM) technology, allowing for increased funding to focus on developing personalized AI products for global users.

"In the past two years, the availability of pre-trained models has increased significantly. As a result, we now see an opportunity to leverage third-party LLMs in addition to our own. This enables us to allocate more resources towards post-training and developing new product experiences for our expanding user base."

Alphabet has made changes to its organization to respond to criticism that it was slow to enter the AI chatbot market, which was dominated by OpenAI's ChatGPT. Last year, Google was reportedly considering investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI.

"Shazeer expressed his excitement about returning to Google and joining the Google DeepMind team, stating that he is proud of the achievements at Character.AI and confident that the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement and the talented Character.AI team will ensure continued success in the future."

Noam, a renowned machine learning researcher, is joining Google DeepMind's research team, along with a few of his colleagues.

Amid a competitive talent and AI market, companies are forming partnerships to navigate a tough regulatory landscape that scrutinizes mergers and acquisitions. The British competition watchdog has recently announced an investigation into Google's partnership with AI startup Anthropic.

In March, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind, and many of its staff to lead AI initiatives. Suleyman was appointed as an executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella. Last month, UK regulators launched a merger probe into Microsoft's acquisition of DeepMind's staff.