Character.ai
California
United States
Overview
Fancy a chinwag with Elon Musk? What about a casual chat with former President Donald Trump, a one-on-one tutorial from Albert Einstein, or a collaborative reasoning session with Sherlock Holmes? Character.ai is a startup that uses generative AI technology to build chatbots for achieving exactly that.
The concept of chatbots, software that’s able to participate in human-like conversation, has been around for decades. But while at times impressive (a 1960s computational psychotherapist named ELIZA disconcerted even its creator in its effectiveness), more often than not these have been simplistic tools used for functional purposes like triaging customer support queries.
Character.ai represents the next generation of AI chatbot, not only able to “understand” complex queries and offer appropriate answers, but also able to draw upon vast troves of information. It’s even possible to fine-tune their parameters to give them distinct personalities.
The founders of Character.ai were previously employed at Google, where they worked on the company’s LaMDA (“Language Model for Dialogue Applications”) project, best known for causing the departure of a Google engineer who was convinced of the AI’s sentience. What they have essentially done is open this technology up to the world—allowing users to create their own bots and then share them with the community so that others can take them for a spin. As a result, the company’s website offers a smorgasbord of homespun chatbots—ranging from the aforementioned simulated famous individuals to tools for practice job interviews to interview gaming characters (think an AI “dungeon master” from Dungeons & Dragons). Investors have been just as keen to engage as users, helping drum up more than $150 million of funding thus far.
A more cohesive form will probably emerge for all of this over time. However, it’s impossible not to see the potential in all this, despite occasionally veering into Black Mirror territory.
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The concept of chatbots, software that’s able to participate in human-like conversation, has been around for decades. But while at times impressive (a 1960s computational psychotherapist named ELIZA disconcerted even its creator in its effectiveness), more often than not these have been simplistic tools used for functional purposes like triaging customer support queries.
Character.ai represents the next generation of AI chatbot, not only able to “understand” complex queries and offer appropriate answers, but also able to draw upon vast troves of information. It’s even possible to fine-tune their parameters to give them distinct personalities.
The founders of Character.ai were previously employed at Google, where they worked on the company’s LaMDA (“Language Model for Dialogue Applications”) project, best known for causing the departure of a Google engineer who was convinced of the AI’s sentience. What they have essentially done is open this technology up to the world—allowing users to create their own bots and then share them with the community so that others can take them for a spin. As a result, the company’s website offers a smorgasbord of homespun chatbots—ranging from the aforementioned simulated famous individuals to tools for practice job interviews to interview gaming characters (think an AI “dungeon master” from Dungeons & Dragons). Investors have been just as keen to engage as users, helping drum up more than $150 million of funding thus far.
A more cohesive form will probably emerge for all of this over time. However, it’s impossible not to see the potential in all this, despite occasionally veering into Black Mirror territory.
