It has been reported that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who have been engaged in a war of nerves, even sparking the ‘hyeonpi’ controversy, are now competing for collaboration with an AI chatbot company.
The British daily Financial Times (FT) reported on the 25th that Meta, the parent company of Facebook run by Zuckerberg, and xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup, are competing for collaboration with ‘Character.AI’. local time) reported. Character.
AI is a company founded in 2021 by Noam Sherzier, a former researcher at Google Brain, Google’s deep learning AI research team. It is an AI chatbot service that uses large language models (LLM) to provide conversations with various people and is gaining popularity among young Americans. It also received support from Andreessen Horowitz, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.
According to the FT, four people familiar with the matter said that Meta recently held initial discussions about a partnership with Character.AI. Multiple officials also mentioned that Character.AI had conducted similar discussions with Musk’s xAI. However, it has been reported that discussions between the companies have not yet led to an agreement.
FT pointed out that the interest in Character.AI clearly shows the recent trend in which tech companies are pursuing collaboration and investment with AI startups to develop cutting-edge technologies. In September of last year, Meta created a so-called ‘AI Persona’ chatbot that applied the personalities of celebrities and made it available on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
xAI developed its own chatbot ‘Grok’ and provided it to premium subscribers of X (formerly Twitter). It is known that discussions on collaboration with Character.AI are focused on expanding research rather than acquisition. This is because big tech companies are hesitant to attempt to acquire AI startups due to the impact of global regulatory measures.
For example, Microsoft’s (MS) and OpenAI’s $13 billion collaboration was investigated by U.S. and European competition authorities over whether it was a merger or acquisition, despite both parties’ denials. In addition to Character.
AI, Meta is known to have discussed strategic partnerships with Open AI and Adept, a startup created by Google AI developers. Regarding the FT report, Character.AI and Meta declined to comment, and Musk did not respond to a request for comment.