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Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is in discussions to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in startup chatbot creator Character.Ai.
The investment may be structured as convertible notes and is expected to add to an existing partnership bewtwen Chacter.Ai and Google (GOOG), according to a Reuters report on Friday, which cited people familiar with the matter. Google currently uses Character.Ai’s cloud services and tensor processing units (TPUs) to train models.
Character.Ai is in talks to raise equity funding from venture capital investors, which may value the startup at more than $5 billion, according to Reuters. In March, the company raised $150 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at $1 billion valuation.
Character.ai, founded in 2021 by former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, uses large language models (LLMs) to generate conversation in the style of personalities such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Nintendo character Mario, to name a few.
The Financial Times reported in August that Meta Platforms (META) planned to launch a range of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots which exude different personalities as soon as September in an attempt to bolster engagement with its social media platforms.