The new AI deal: buy everything but the company

In 2022, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas left their jobs developing artificial intelligence at Google. They said the tech giant moved too slowly. So they created Character.AI, a chatbot startup, and raised nearly $200 million.

Last week, Shazeer and De Freitas announced that they were returning to Google. They had struck a deal to rejoin its AI research arm, along with roughly 20% of Character.AI’s employees, and provide their startup’s technology, they said.

But even though Google was getting all that, it was not buying Character.AI.