AI’m feeling lucky
Google is reportedly lining up an investment worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Character.ai, just weeks after the company agreed to push some $2 billion into another AI startup, Anthropic.
Character.ai, which raised $150 million in a funding round that valued the company at $1 billion earlier this year, already has ties to the search giant, having been founded by former Google employees who’d previously worked on its large language models.
As with competitors like ChatGPT, monthly visits to the platform have dropped modestly since the summer — per data from Similarweb via Variety — but its users are still giving up a lot of time pretend-talking-to everyone from Tony Soprano to Napoleon Bonaparte.
Characterful
Developers have rushed to imbue chatbots with distinct “personas” and character traits to distinguish them from the ever-growing crowd of automatons. Last month, for example, Meta announced its range of AI with in-built “personality” on Messenger, while Elon Musk’s xAI unveiled Grok, a chatbot with a "rebellious streak”, in early November.
On this front, Character.ai has been several steps ahead of the game for a while — and users can’t seem to get enough. Indeed, since its launch last September, the chatbot’s been generating over 1 billion words each day, delivered by bots resembling celebrities, fictional characters, and historical figures. The chatbot’s users spend almost 5x longer in a typical interaction than ChatGPT fans spend with the OpenAI bot, with desktop and mobile Character.ai users logging an astonishing 33 minutes on the platform per visit in August.
