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Character . AI is come out a new chapter after its$2.7 billion licensingdeal with Google , which involvedCEO Noam Shazeer returning to the lookup giant . It hired Erin Teague as a principal product military officer , a YouTube exec who was the global head of fun flick and register production direction .
Teague , who has been work at Google since 2016 , will join Character . AI next week . She also antecedently served as a technical adviser to the SVP for Search , Ads , Maps , Gemini , Assistant , shopping , and payments most lately .
“ Character . AIis setting a new bar for how everyday user interact with AI , initiate personalized and engage AI experience at scale , ” Teague said in a command . “ I reckon forward to building on this one - of - a - kind platform to introduce and design raw features that harbour and delectation . ”
In August , the company announced that Shazeer was hark back to Google . Another co - founder , Daniel De Freitas , also connect Google with 30 research worker .
send these departure , Dominic Perella , Character . AI ’s interim CEO and general counsel , told TechCrunch that the company has roughly 100 employee now and will wholly sharpen on consumer AI solutions rather than chase artificial general intelligence . As departing employees mostly center on pre - training models , the people who are still at Character . AI are largely focused on engineering , product , and post - training and tuning models .
Teague is the first major hire for the company after the atomic number 27 - founder departed to Google . Character . AI said that it will still keep looking for newfangled C - suite executives , including a CEO to replace Perella .
Character.AI’s product and roadmap
The companionship has bought out all investor , and it ’s completely employee - possess . No VC owns portion in Character . AI . The circuit card consist of a16z and another employee .
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“ I expect that sometime next class , we will go out to the market and raise monetary resource with a new venture capital pardner . The reason for this is to have that investment in the society and get additional government activity , partnership , and thought leaders , ” Perella said .
Character . AI , which let user create and interact with different AI - powered characters , now has more than 20 million monthly user , which has repeat year over class . The platform now has over 100 million characters .
In June , the companionship set up the power for users tocall AI characters and speak with them . The startup said that user have made over 107 million calls , and 40 % of its users have made at least one call .
Perella tote up that Character . AI characters can already talk to people through text and part , but the company is exploring other modalities , too .
The military service ’s $ 9.99 c.ai+ monthly subscription is one of the only consistent money - generating sources . However , the company is not presently digest on revenue generation and is alternatively concentrate on growth .
Character . AI allege that a lot of company have approached the startup to power their reference , and it has explored some of these partnership , but Perella did n’t limit whether there was something concrete on the posting .
“ The imaginativeness that we have is that the next large consumer platform is really go to be about personalizing your interests in a way that algorithmic feeds of the last generation did n’t , ” Perella say .
