Google may want to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in AI chatbot specialist Character.AI. With this investment, AI chatbot startup wants to finance training its models. It also hopes to continue to meet user demand, Reuters writes.
The planned investment from Google should strengthen the mutual existing cooperation in the field of AI. Character.AI already uses Google’s cloud offerings and trains its AI models on the tech giant’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).
Celebrity-based chatbot
Character.AI allows its users to converse with virtual versions of famous people or anime characters while creating their own chatbots or AI assistants. The AI chatbot service is especially popular among end users between the ages of 18 and 24, web traffic analyses show. About 60 percent of all traffic comes from this age group.
Other investment round
In addition to the possible investment by Google, Character.AI is also said to be in talks with other investors to raise capital. This investment round could give the company an enterprise value of more than 4.7 billion euros ($5 billion).
In March this year, the AI startup raised $150 million on an enterprise value of $1 billion.
Both Google and Character AI are not commenting on the investment rumours.
Also read: Will OpenAI now change building chatbots for good?