Google is in negotiations to invest in Character, an AI firm.AI, strengthen current alliance

 Google is in negotiations to invest in Character, an AI firm.AI, strengthen current alliance

Morality.According to insiders, AI is also in discussions with venture capital investors to obtain equity money, which could put the company's valuation beyond $5 billion. At a $1 billion valuation, it received $150 million in a fundraising round headed by Andreessen Horowitz in March.

In addition to its previous stock investment, Google has been investing in AI firms. It has paid $2 billion in convertible notes to model manufacturer Anthropic.

There are discussions for Alphabet's Google to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI, according to two people informed on the situation who spoke with Reuters. The rapidly expanding artificial intelligence chatbot firm is looking for funding to train models and meet customer demand.

The investment will strengthen the current partnership character; it may be structured as convertible notes, according to a third source.AI already has a relationship with Google via which it trains models using Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Google cloud services.

Comment inquiries were not answered by Google or Character AI.

Character was founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, two former Google workers.AI enables users to create their own chatbots and AI helpers and converse with virtual representations of popular celebrities like Billie Eilish or anime characters. Although it is free to use, there is a subscription option available for $9.99 per month for customers who would like bypass the virtual line and speak with a chatbot.

Morality.With a variety of roles and tones to choose from, AI's chatbots have proven popular with users between the ages of 18 and 24, who accounted for about 60% of the website's traffic, according to Similarweb statistics. In contrast to other AI chatbots like Google's Bard and OpenAI's ChatGPT, the firm is positioning itself as the supplier of more enjoyable personal AI companions thanks in part to this demography.

In the first six months after its inception, the corporation claimed that 100 million monthly visits had been made to their website.

Morality.According to insiders, AI is also in discussions with venture capital investors to obtain equity money, which could put the company's valuation beyond $5 billion. At a $1 billion valuation, it received $150 million in a fundraising round headed by Andreessen Horowitz in March.

The individuals, who asked to remain anonymous because the conversations are confidential, claimed that the talks with Google are still continuing and that the terms of the agreement might alter.

In addition to its previous stock investment, Google has been investing in AI firms. It has paid $2 billion in convertible notes to model manufacturer Anthropic. Anthropic makes advantage of both the most recent TPU version from Google and its cloud services.

That is a part of a recent trend in which major cloud service providers, such as Microsoft with its investments in OpenAI and Google and Amazon with their bets on Anthropic, are making deals with AI companies to entice them to use specific cloud or hardware in the computer-intensive ethnic background to build models and serve consumers.

At a San Francisco event last week, US Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan said that the agency is investigating cloud providers' involvement in AI firms to check for any anti-competitive practices.