An interview with Character.ai's founders, who say they left Google's LaMDA project to let users experiment with the latest in language AI through chatbots
The creators of Google's LaMDA have launched the chatbot startup Character.ai, which is open for anyone to try
Washington PostNitasha Tiku
Context & Ripple Effects
Character.ai takes work associated with Google’s LaMDA effort into a public, consumer-facing format rather than keeping it inside Google. The move gives users a way to test conversational language AI directly at a point when mainstream access is still emerging.
Character.ai gains direct access to users for its chatbot service, while its founders operate outside Google’s LaMDA project.
Google loses the founders’ independent product execution as Character.ai turns comparable language-model interaction into a separate public offering.
Second-order effects
OpenAI, Google, and other chatbot builders face a clearer consumer benchmark: users can compare general-purpose assistants with character-led conversation products.
If character-led chat continues to attract users, consumer AI competition will differentiate less by model access alone and more by the relationship, personality, and controls wrapped around the model.
The category may split between tightly governed mainstream assistants and services that compete on more open-ended interaction, making moderation a product-positioning choice as well as a technical one.
The trend: Consumer language AI is moving from research-lab systems toward public conversational products, including character-based experiences built around ongoing user relationships.
Snapshot from a conversation with a chatbot called “Black Guy” made available by https://t.co/..., the chatbot startup from Google engineers. Other user-generated chatbots include “Jewish guy,” “Needy girlfriend,” and “White woke feminist” https://twitter.com/...
There seem to be so many AI startups popping up. This is interesting from “Ethical AI” pov, bc megacorps like G MS FB are held to v strict standard. They cant take risks. With startups however, out of 100s of startups, it only takes 1 to try sth that a megacorp cld never do. http…
What worries me is the lack of transparency about data acquisition (which likely means they got it from places like Reddit). “Publicly accessible” data is very poor quality. https://twitter.com/...
“A new chatbot start-up from two top artificial intelligence talents lets anyone strike up a conversation with impersonations of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes. Registered users type in messages and get responses.... https://twitter.com/...
@nitashatiku keeps blowing our minds. A new chatbot start-up from two top artificial intelligence talents lets anyone strike up a conversation with impersonations of Donald Trump, Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
This is AI scare mongering. Say if i recorded offensive stuff, that replayed, do we blame the audio recorder? If a film maker makes racist movie, who do we blame? There's a big category of (justified) alarms in AI that falls under user errors, but are not categorized as such. htt…
“We're talking about making horse carriages safe and regulating them and they've already created cars and put them on the roads,” @timnitGebru https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
I interviewed the ex-Google AI researchers behind LaMDA who left because they wanted to expose the public to large language models through (what else) chatbots, including letting anyone create their own https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Noam Shazeer created Google's spelling correction, the 1st version of its calculator, and contributed to the transformer architecture. (He also worked with me and Greg Keim to solve crosswords!) His new startup makes fun chatbots. Try it out! https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...