Sharon Goldman @sharongoldman March 23,2023
The steady march of eye-popping investments into companies developing large language models (LLMs) continues. The New York Times reported today that OpenAI rival Character AI has raised a fresh $150 million in a recent funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz that values the company at $1 billion — which adds it to the 2023 unicorn club, even though the company has no revenue.
The Silicon Valley-based Character AI was founded in 2021 by two former Google researchers: Daniel De Freitas, who previously led LaMDA at Google Brain, and Noam Shazeer, one of the researchers behind the Transformers architecture, the technology that underlies ChatGPT.