AI startup whose co-founders rejoined Google lays off 5% employees – Times of India

AI chatbot startup Character.AI has laid off at least 5%, or roughly 120 employees, of its workforce, a report has said, adding that the staff who were laid off mostly worked on marketing and recruiting for the startup. Recently, the co-founders of the startup rejoined Google as a part of a deal between the tech companies.
“We are refocusing the company to ensure all roles align with our new direction to build personalised AI (artificial intelligence) products,” news agency Reuters quoted a Character.AI spokesperson as saying.
“As a result, we have made a small reduction in our workforce,” the spokesperson said, without giving the numbers of the laid off employees. The development was first reported by The Information, claiming that the announcement about the job cuts was made in a note to employees.

Google’s deal with Character.AI

Earlier this month, Character.AI signed an agreement with Google that grants the search engine giant a non-exclusive licence to the chatbot maker’s large language model technology. As a part of this agreement, Character.AI co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas joined Google, where they were formerly employees.
Character.AI will get more funding as part of the deal with Google.
“We’re particularly thrilled to welcome back Noam, a preeminent researcher in machine learning, who is joining Google DeepMind’s research team, along with a small number of his colleagues,” a Google spokesperson said in an email.
Shazeer has been appointed as a technical co-lead on Gemini, Google’s flagship Al project, joining the other co-leaders Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals.
“We are thrilled to join the best team on earth building the most valuable technology on earth,” Shazeer wrote in an email.
Gemini is a large language model developed by Google’s Al division DeepMind and is used in products like Search as well as Pixel smartphones.