Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This popular new favorite of AI chat crushed ChatGPT in its first week of downloads. More interestingly, the unicorn behind the product is Google's former LaMDA team. Politely refuse to chop wood and run away from Google, is this going to the pinnacle of life?

Silicon Valley unicorns, shaking the world again!

The core strength of this unicorn, called Character Technologies, comes from the former Google LaMDA team.

Less than a week after their new product was launched on mobile, downloads reached 1.7 million, directly crushing ChatGPT!

And the company is now valued at $1 billion.

So, is this another OpenAI?

The number of downloads surpassed ChatGPT in the first week, what's the origin? Character.AI is an app that gives users the freedom to create AI roles and chat with them.

It sounds familiar, right? after all, there have been a lot of similar products before.

But the popularity of Character.AI is unexpected.

Character.AI has been hugely popular since its launch on May 23 for iOS and Android users around the world. In just 48 hours, the Android version has been installed more than 700000 times.

A week later, an even more astonishing number came-more than 1.7 million downloads on mobile.

Character.AI claims that before the release of the app, the Character.AI site received more than 200 million visits, and users spent an average of 29 minutes per visit-300% of ChatGPT's.

Even more than YouTube!

Although ChatGPT has acquired a large number of users in a short period of time, Character.AI is more beloved by users, the company said.

After users send the first message to the AI role, their average time on the platform jumps to more than 2 hours.

Now, users love the app, and so far they have created more than 10 million custom AI characters.

The future of Character.AI is bright. As early as March this year, the company announced that it had raised up to $150 million in round A financing, valuing its business at $1 billion.

What is this concept? In other words, Character.AI has become one of the few AI unicorns at the same level as OpenAI.

The editor experienced firsthand what is the magic of this app that fascinates investors and users? Let's measure it.

In the mobile version, which was launched at the end of May, the "virtual celebrities" created by users can already be used by you.

Waiting for favourite characters, from Musk to Socrates, everything from thousands of years up and down.

Let's just click one and go in and have a look.

The richest man in Ma was really very busy, and his reply was very concise and concise.

But after all, there is a language model behind it, and after a few words, he starts to talk to you back and forth.

Of course, it still maintains the tone of the "long Earth Ball" guidance.

Next, let's try another celebrity, Tony Stark, the "digital virtual man" of Ma's richest man.

I can see that he didn't seem very happy for us to ask "the other him in the world". He spoke strangely from beginning to end.

After chatting with the big star, I found Xiaozha lying quietly at the bottom of the list, so I clicked in to flirt with him.

Before I could say a few words, I activated Xiaoza's attribute as "the first person responsible for the stock price of Meta" and began to defend his company desperately.

In this tone, it seems that I am really angry with me.

It was a little touching to watch him defend himself and the company at the top of his voice.

This is the only function of chatting with virtual celebrities, which makes me feel quite on the top just after downloading and registering.

If you look at the names in this long list of categories, basically all the celebrities I want to chat with can find the corresponding AI to chat for a while.

And according to the experience of the brief communication between the characters just now, the responses of the characters are basically in line with their position in the minds of the public.

It can be said that for the vast majority of ordinary people who do not have the opportunity to have a face-to-face conversation with these celebrities, the app does provide an opportunity to "get in close contact" with stars or their favorite characters.

The trump card function that makes Character.AI continue to attract new users and indulge old users is actually-- self-created AI role chat, AKA AI cosplay.

In order to experience the Chinese language ability of this application, the editor conveniently created two AI roles of his own.

The first role is very simple. I added a greeting to the introduction, and AI, a footballer who is about to join Real Madrid, was generated.

For the second role, I decided to put a little effort into it.

Recalling the protagonist of the first computer game I played in my life, I created him with the only pieces of memory I had about him.

After the creation, I first tried to have a brief chat with the football star.

Because I hardly made any settings for the character myself, his reply was almost random to me.

The second reply directly appeared "national scolding", which caught me off guard.

When I added the character description, friendly, like to cooperate with teammates, the style of chat slowly began to normal.

Then I began to chat with the game White Moonlight on my mind for a while.

Sure enough, because I described it more fully and specifically, Lele was able to reply to a lot of details in my memory of the game.

Although much of the content is generated by himself, it basically restores the game characters in the description.

Let the editor recall the happy time when he finished his homework and played "cat and dog" when he was a child.

Maybe this character will stay on my phone for a long time, and I will continue to fill it in when I think of some game details.

When you are free, you can still chat with Lele and recall those adventures in wooden barrel Town together.

Using the "20% time", they created a prototype Character.AI of 1 billion unicorns less than two years ago, raising nearly $200m. The identity of the founder must be a big factor for a start-up to be so favored by investors.

Yes, the founders of Character.AI, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, are from the famous Google LaMDA team.

Noam Shazeer is a veteran who has worked at Google for more than 20 years.

The principle behind Character.AI is to use a neurolinguistic model to read large amounts of text and use that information to respond to prompts.

Founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas had previously built LaMDA, a language model that supports dialogue programs at Google, which sparked a subsequent uproar in which "Google programmers insisted that LaMDA was conscious".

Now that we have experienced the high-energy baptism of big models such as ChatGPT, we have long been accustomed to it, but at that time, it made a lot of people san crazy.

In 2015, De Freitas, then a software engineer at Microsoft, read a paper published by scientists at Google Brain, Google's flagship AI lab.

It is in this paper that the researchers introduce in detail a "neural dialogue model" that shows how machines learn the art of dialogue by analyzing the dialogue records of hundreds of films.

Address: https://arxiv.org/ pdf / 1506.05869.pdfDe Freitas was not an AI Institute when he read this paper. At that time, he was a software engineer working on search engines.

What he really wants is to take Google's ideas to the extreme of logic. "you can let this robot generalize. What it says doesn't look like a line from a movie. "

In 17, De Freitas joined Google as an engineer at Youtube.

Google's tradition is that everyone has a "20% time" project to explore new ideas after completing daily tasks.

In 20% of the time, De Freitas began to build his own chat robot.

In order to train the neural network with a larger set of conversations, such as a large number of chat transcripts selected from social networks, he needs a lot of math.

Fortunately, as a Google engineer, he has some points to run software in the company's computer data center network. But soon, he didn't have enough math, so he had to borrow points from other engineers.

As more and more data are analyzed by the system, the skills of chatbots are also developing by leaps and bounds.

At first, De Freitas used the LSTM neural network to train robots, and then he quickly turned to the Transformer neural network developed by the Google team.

Unlike LSTM, which reads text one word at a time, Transformer can use multiple computer processors to analyze the entire document in one step.

Soon, he created the chat robot Meena, and Google noticed his project and upgraded it to official research. Later, Menna became LaMDA.

Google refused to chop wood, ran away from Google and reached the peak of its life after the engineer claimed that LaMDA was conscious, Google was reluctant to release the technology for fear that misinformation and toxic comments would damage Google's brand image.

As a result, Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas came up with the intention to go.

It is reported that Google CEO has come forward to retain the two people, hoping that they will continue to work on LaMDA development, but did not promise to release the chat robot to the public.

So the two left Google at the end of 2021 and launched their startup, Character Technologies Inc., in November of that year and launched Character.AI.

In December 2021, the company raised $43 million in seed funding.

In the founder's LinkedIn introduction, he has been involved in almost all the big language model projects with Google over the past five years and achieved remarkable results.

When a technology boss of this level comes out to start a business, he naturally gets the money and gets the soft hand.

Institutions and individuals involved in the investment include Paul Buchheit, the father of A16Z Magi, SVA, Gmail, and so on.

Until now, the company's team is only 30 people, very busy.

In addition, it announced a partnership with Google Cloud. Using Google Cloud's tensor processor unit, companies can build and train large language models faster and more effectively.

A thriving community of creators, Character.AI also has a rich community of creators.

Here, users can exchange their own experiences in creating various AI characters.

They will also share their carefully created characters, such as ghost samurai girls trapped in the modern world.

Cute fix hook.

And her husband...

Unwittingly, users may have a deep connection between their experiences and the roles they have created.

This is why Character.AI has always stressed that it is an AI product with the highest user stickiness and duration of use.

Because whether users are simply chatting or settling down to create their own AI roles, they will certainly invest a lot of time and energy on the platform.

On the other hand, the AI role, which is blessed by the large model technology, seems to have really come back to life to interact with users and has a unique personality.

With the deep connection established with users, users are reluctant to leave the platform and continue to contribute diverse content to the platform.

That's how Character.AI underpins unicorn-level valuations.

Reference:

Https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/31/character-ai-the-a16z-backed-chatbot-startup-tops-1-7m-installs-in-first-week/

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Xin Zhiyuan (ID:AI_era)

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.