Character.AI Lets People 'Talk' With A Celebrity Receives $350 Million In Andreessen Horowitz Funding Round

Venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz led the latest massive artificial intelligence (AI) funding round with a $350 total investment in Character.AI. 

The company refers to its offering as a “personalized superintelligence platform” and enables users to build customizable and personalized AI companions with unique personality traits and communication styles. Users can also access the millions of previously created AI characters that include historical figures, celebrities, politicians and myriad other groups. 

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Former Google employees Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer created the company. De Freitas previously led the project team that created a chatbot called Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). The chatbot represented a significant leap forward in AI technology. It also garnered attention in the summer o f 2022 when a Google engineer stated LaMDA was sentient. The company repeatedly denied the claim and later terminated the employee, but it raised questions and awareness about AI’s power. Shazeer worked on the AI infrastructure that became the basis for ChatGPT.

The investment puts Character.AI at a $1 billion valuation, which gets it onto the prestigious list of unicorn companies — private firms valued at $1 billion or more — compiled by CB Insights. Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capital firm run by billionaires Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company funds a variety of innovative technologies, including AI, the metaverse, cryptocurrencies and several others. 

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Investments continue to flow into AI as the technology continues to achieve breakthroughs and amaze users with its capabilities. Startup Adept, which makes generative AI software that will create digital actions based on users’ texts, recently raised $350 million in Series B funding from various venture capitalist investors. 

The biggest tech firms are investing in AI and implementing the technology into their products. They’re racing to launch the most advanced chatbots to capture users’ attention and market share. Microsoft Corp. continues to invest billions of dollars in OpenAI, the creator of the AI tool ChatGPT that can answer nearly any query, produce business plans and build code. Google is also investing in AI, and recently launched its own AI chatbot Bard, signaling the start of a lengthy “AI arms race” among the biggest tech firms. 

Chat with George Washington or Miley Cyrus

Character.AI enables users to chat with facsimiles of nearly anyone, from their deceased uncle or their talkative neighbor to a virtual version of the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher or actor Keanu Reeves. For example, users can talk to a facsimile of Elon Musk and ask him questions about SpaceX or how hard he expects his employees to work. The chatbot responds as Musk, leveraging his past interviews and interactions to inform the conversational answers.

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The Character.AI engine responds to inquiries as a virtual person, using its technology to present answers that capture that person’s tone and personality based on prior discussions or research. The answers make contextual sense in terms of the question posed by the user and take into account the respondent’s personality. It can also turn the “thoughts” of a historical figure into language that is accessible to the modern user while still retaining that digital person’s unique characteristics. 

The AI responds to prompts in a conversational manner and is able to adapt its language capabilities and tone depending on the person it is interacting with. It can also change its speaking style to increase a user’s comfort level. 

Compared to ChatGPT, Character.AI presents an entertaining live chat with natural back-and-forth communication that mimics human conversation. It uses humorous responses to make the chatbot conversations seem more natural and human. The platform warns users that everything the chatbot personalities say is “made up” because of its frequently odd and strangely human responses.

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