Google hires top talent from startup Character.AI, signs licensing deal

Startup Character.AI said on Friday it has signed an agreement with Alphabet’s Google that grants the search engine giant a non-exclusive license to the chatbot maker’s large language model technology.

The deal, echoing ones struck by Microsoft and Amazon in the past few months, will see Character.AI co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas rejoin Google, where they were formerly employees.