I am a senior reporter for technology, covering venture capital and startups. I am based out of Forbes' San Francisco bureau, where I previously covered tech billionaires as a wealth reporter, and wrote about artificial intelligence as an assistant editor for technology. I graduated from Duke University, where I spent time as news editor for The Chronicle, the university's independent news organization. Follow me on Twitter at @kenrickcai, on Mastodon at @[email protected] and email me at k
In its latest product launch, the unicorn AI startup is bringing bots that make it sound like you’re talking to well known people like Taylor Swift into your group chat.nside Character.AI’s disheveled Palo Alto, California headquarters, employees at first appear to be hard at work, glued to their computer monitors. But rather than coding, many of them are engrossed in lively group chats with their colleagues and the AI chatbot characters that Character has become known for.
Backed by nearly $200 million from VCs including Andreessen Horowitz, and valued at $1 billion in a March funding round, Character.AI has wowed the startup community with its engagement time — it claims registered users who send at least one message on a given day spend an average of two hours on the platform. Since its initial launch in September 2022, 20 million users have signed up for Character.
There are other, more practical issues: the feature is only available on Character.AI’s mobile app, and the chatbots appeared to only respond to the most recent message from a human user. Part of the urgency to launch the product now, before a new model is ready, may have to do with several generative AI tools launched by Meta in late September. In anlast month, Mark Zuckerberg outlined a vision of bringing AI “characters” to his company’s various products. “You’ll be able to talk to them in WhatsApp and Messenger and Instagram, and they'll be embodied as avatars in virtual reality,” he said.
Startup challengers Replika and Chai have emerged, but the space remained devoid of Big Tech challengers until Zuckerberg’s announcement last month. But Shazeer claims to be unfazed by these competitors. “We’re competing against the $2 trillion industry of legacy entertainment” — say, games, books and movies — “because people want a lot of the same things like fun, the social experience and interesting content.
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