Recently, Google spent up to $2.7 billion to bring back an AI expert, Noam Shazeer, who left the company in 2021 to start his own startup, Character.AI. This company allows users to interact with role-playing chatbots and has become a popular project. Source note: Image generated by AI, image licensed by provider Midjourney. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google has allocated this hefty amount.

Google's acquisition of the AI startup Character.AI and the return of its former CEO Noam Shazeer as co-technical lead for the Gemini project demonstrate its ambitions in the field of artificial intelligence. Shazeer will collaborate with experts like Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals to ensure that the Gemini project maintains an edge in competition with ChatGPT. This acquisition not only strengthens Google's AI research team but could also enhance AI conversational capabilities.

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is exploring the possibility of acquiring chatbot manufacturer Character.AI, a move aimed at further testing and developing xAI's own Grok chatbot.

Google plans to deepen its collaboration with Character.AI and invest hundreds of millions of dollars. Character.AI, founded by former Google employees, offers chatbot services for communication with virtual celebrities and anime characters. The investment will accelerate Character.AI's model training to meet the growing user demand. Google has been continuously investing in AI startups recently, driving innovation and development in the industry.