Chatbot Start-Up Character.AI Valued at $1 Billion in New Funding Round

Venture capitalists are jockeying to invest in the young A.I. companies even as the rest of the tech industry struggles through layoffs, plummeting valuations and an unexpected banking crisis prompted by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.

Like OpenAI, the new A.I. companies are building what are called large language models, or L.L.M.s, a kind of artificial intelligence that learns language skills by analyzing vast amounts of data from across the internet. The technology drives online chatbots like ChatGPT and can power a wide range of other applications, including search engines, email services and personal tutors.

L.L.M.s can answer questions, summarize articles, write term papers and even generate computer programs, but only a limited number of companies are prepared to build systems as powerful as those recently released by OpenAI.

The new funding round in Character.AI., which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., was led by Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s best known venture capital firms. In December 2021, the company raised $43 million in seed funding.

While at Google, Character.AI’s founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, led a team that built a technology called LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. The chatbot project gained attention last summer when a Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, told The Washington Post that he believed LaMDA was sentient.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/technology/chatbot-characterai-chatgpt-valuation.html