Character.ai Drove 5 Million Downloads With Einstein, Elon Musk, And Other Celebrity Chatbots

Character.ai is winning in generative AI with an approach unlike any other. While most companies have created generalized chatbots that answer random questions, Character.ai has made it possible for users to design their own chatbots that can impersonate anyone or anything.

Redefining Chatbots with Personalized AI

Based in Palo Alto, Character.ai has quickly become the most unique $1 billion artificial intelligence startup. The company was co-founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, both of who are former employees of Google.

Both individuals have made significant contributions to the AI field, establishing themselves as leaders in the industry. Specifically, De Freitas was instrumental in developing Google’s leading generative AI model, LaMDA, alongside the Google Brain team. Meanwhile, Shazeer played a key role in the influential 2017 research paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which marked a turning point in natural language processing.

The idea to establish the company came up when the duo was still working at Google. Their goal was to develop an open platform that would enable users to customize their technology to fit their specific needs.

According to De Freitas, the objective was to provide each person with access to their own “deeply personalized, super intelligence to help them live their best lives”. “I joke that we’re not going to replace Google. We’re going to replace your mom,” said Shazeer.

Since its launch, the platform has been a great success having attained an average of 200 million users each month as of May. So far, users have created over 16 million different chatbots of famous personalities from US President Joe Biden to Albert Einstein, other characters, and even inanimate things.

For instance, through Character.ai, users have been able to write over 135 million messages to Raiden Shogun and Ei, from Genshin Impact whereas Micheal Jackson has received about 4 million texts.

The company also launched a Character.ai app in May which has seen over 5 million downloads in less than 2 months. According to SensorTower data, the downloads vastly outpace those of other rival new chatbots like Chai and AI Chatbot.

Aside from winning users, Character.ai has also been able to win over investors who raised $150 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. This enabled the company to become a unicorn with a $1 billion valuation barely 16 months after its establishment.

Character.ai Monetizes Problems

Despite the great success Character.ai has been so far, seemingly, the founders did not foresee its growth. Due to its massive adoption, the platform has been experiencing occasional lack of service potentially as a result of scalability issues.

I love how I always run to twitter every time character ai is down cause I wanna make sure it’s not only my problem pic.twitter.com/cgeaHzXhGV

— sofiaaa (@sofrrl) July 5, 2023

The company has addressed this issue by turning it into a revenue source for the platform. To prevent seeing a “Currently under high load” message when using the platform, Character.ai provides a premium option, c.ai+. For a monthly fee of $9.99, users can skip queues and other wait times to access the service.

Like every other AI company, however, Character.ai is in the line of fire for many issues and concerns. One major problem that is impending is legal issues emanating from the impersonation of personalities by chatbots. The platform, for instance, already has about 20 different versions of Walt Disney Co.’s Mickey Mouse, which is a copyrighted character.

Additionally, there is also concern over copyrighted content and images that users can upload as the face of the chatbot they create. This has proven to be a problem in the industry at large as content owners have retaliated against AI companies for the unconsented use of their work.

Fortunately, the law provides a lot of legal protection for such impersonations which prevents Character.ai from going after its users for uploading other people’s content on the platform. Moreover, considering the popularity of the platform, the company is protected from a lot of legal action.

“Fans are involved and you don’t want your fans seeing the litigation side of your brand management,” Zahr Said, a law professor at the University of Washington, said to Bloomberg.

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