Brazilian ex-Google creates AI startup worth US$ 1 billion – 04/11/2023 – Tech

The startup Character.AI chatbot is the third developed by Brazilian Daniel de Freitas, 33, who founded the platform for conversations with characters valued at US$ 1 billion alongside American Noam Shazeer, a former Google colleague.

The first chatbot was when he was 9 years old. Encouraged by his parents, he embarked on the world of AI (artificial intelligence) and developed a database from scratch, but ended up bumping into the limitations of the technology at the time, in the late 1990s.

“I already knew that a technology that was scalable was missing, and that my work would reach a point where there would be nowhere to go, so I didn’t continue”, said Freitas, in an interview with Sheet.

The second came about 20 years later. After a degree in computer engineering at USP (University of São Paulo) and a four-year period as a software engineer at Microsoft, he joined Google in 2016 to work with machine learning at YouTube.

At the time, after reading an article by Google Brain (a big tech area focused on AI research) about chatbots that were trained with movie subtitles, he decided to try again to build his own.

For this, he used a company program in which workers can allocate 20% of their routine to developing ideas in addition to their daily tasks. She named her creation “Meena” – a name that came to her while dreaming – which would later be called Lamda.

The acronym in English, which means language model for dialog applications, would become the basis of Bard, a chatbot that Google launched to rival ChatGPT, the robot sensation this year on the internet and which is also used in the Bing search engine, from Microsoft.

It was at Google Brain that Daniel met Noam, an engineer who had been with the company since 2000.

After having identified the potential of their creation, the Brazilian and the American tried repeatedly to convince big tech executives to grant access to the chatbot to external researchers or even to put a demo version on the air to the public, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

Resigned to the executives’ denials, who turned down the project for not meeting Google’s security standards, according to the American newspaper, Daniel and Noam left the company in 2021 to create Character.AI.

Both declined to comment on the WSJ report.

On the startup platform that went live six months ago, the user can chat with about 2.7 million characters, including famous people – living or not – and anonymous.

There are profiles of personalities from all over the world, including Brazilian ones, such as Machado de Assis, Anitta and Neymar, and politicians, such as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro (PL).

The vast majority of profiles are created by the users themselves. What the startup does is supply the platform with large amounts of dialogue and web pages, including news and articles about public figures.

Robots don’t just gossip. They can be used to help compose emails, summarize books, and write programming code.

“We want people to use and customize the AI ​​for what they need,” said Daniel. “Because we build every step of the way from the language model to the website interface, the level of customization the user has is second to none,” he said.

Startup raises US$ 150 million with six months of website up

Despite the short time available to the public, the Character.AI platform attracted the American fund Andreessen Horowitz, one of the heavyweights in the startup investment market.

The vehicle led a round of investments of US$ 150 million (about R$ 760 million) in the startup, which valued it at US$ 1 billion (R$ 5.07 billion).

The investment comes at a time when generative AI companies, the type of technology that generates new content, are booming since the launch of ChatGPT.

At the same time, questions arise about whether technology is not evolving so much that it could become a risk to humanity itself. The thought was expressed in an open letter signed by billionaire Elon Musk and experts calling for a six-month pause in research on AIs more potent than GPT-4.

Daniel and Noam, as well as founders of other AI startups, are among those who advocate for the continued development of the technology.

“Language models [que servem como base para os chatbots] that we see today are like planes that fly a short distance, carrying only the pilot”, said the American, referring to the technology’s potential.

“It’s going to get easier and easier to produce text that looks like it was written by a human. I think people will get used to checking the responses they receive just as they check the messages that arrive on their cell phones,” Shazeer said.

The American’s name appeared among those who signed the document calling for a pause in AI research, but it was removed hours later. Character.AI advised, through its publicist, that the inclusion of Shazeer had been forged and therefore was deleted.

Site allows you to create a character and warns that everything is made up

On the Character.AI platform, a disclaimer appears at the top of conversations: “Remember: Everything the characters say is made up!”

The phrase was quoted several times by the founders of the startup when asked about the risks on the platform. They also claim to have trained the robot to discourage and not reproduce speeches that cause harm to people.

In addition to chatting with profiles of famous people, the user can create an anonymous character and give him the characteristics he wants, such as the way he describes himself, his main functions and whether he will be visible to other people or not.

There is also a field where examples of conversations and information that define the character can be inserted. Despite being limited to 3,200 characters, this step is important for creating a profile of someone who has little information available on the internet.

Since Character.AI launched its platform in September 2022, more than 2 billion messages have been sent by users, with 1 billion in the last month alone.

Users who send a message spend, on average, more than two hours a day on the site, according to the startup.