In its first week, Character.AI, a16z’s chatbot startup, has topped 1.7M installations.
The demand for AI through consumer mobile apps is on the rise. OpenAI’s ChatGPT app, which was launched in June 2016, has had over half a millon downloads. Another AI app, backed by a16z, is now touting their own launch success. The AI app claims to have attracted over 1.7 millions new installs within a week of its launch. The AI app maker announced $150 million in Series A financing earlier this year and valued its business at $1 Billion. It offers users customizable AI companions, with different personalities, as they can also create their own characters.
Character is a popular app. There are many AI character generators in the App Stores today. AI is a product of its founders. Noam Shazeer, a Palo Alto-based AI expert and Daniel De Freitas led a Google team that developed LaMDA. LaMDA is a language model used to power conversational AI.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the founders of Google were frustrated by the company’s hesitation to introduce AI chatbots, even through integrations into other Google products like Assistant. The duo, who believed AI would revolutionize the search industry and other fields, decided to leave Google at the end of 2021 despite Sundar Pichai’s pleas to stay and carry on their work with LaMDA. In November of that year, Shazeer founded Character Technologies. Character is now a part of Character. AI.
Source:
Character.AI, the a16z-backed chatbot startup, tops 1.7M installs in first week
