Why is Character AI used by 20M people every day?
About Noam Shazeer
Noam Shazeer, CEO and co-founder of Character.AI, has discussed the company's growth and the state of large language models in several interviews. He stated that Character.AI's model, trained the previous summer, cost approximately two million dollars in compute cycles, and he noted that the same training could likely be repeated for less due to hardware improvements. Shazeer described the company's user base as 20 million daily users sending 450 million messages per day. He attributed this growth to users discovering unplanned use cases, particularly a mix of entertainment, companionship, and emotional support, citing examples of users talking to video game characters as a form of therapy. Shazeer characterized the company's approach as putting out a general technology and respecting user agency. Shazeer has commented on the competitive landscape and the importance of compute resources, stating that "everybody needs more chips" and that Character.AI intends to "go toe to toe" with larger tech companies. He described the company's goal as being an AGI company and a product-first company, and expressed skepticism about the ability of the federal government to regulate the technology effectively. Shazeer also reflected on his time at Google, where he worked on projects including the first targeting function for AdSense, and noted that startups can ship and learn faster than larger companies due to fewer brand and safety concerns.