Conversational AI is a complex AI model used to create the illusion of a personalized conversation between humans and computers.
Character.AI is a conversational AI (artificial intelligence) platform building dialog agents with the intent to bring to life the science-fiction dream of open-ended conversations and collaborations with computers (1). This beta conversational AI platform selected its preferred cloud infrastructure within Google Cloud to build and train sophisticated AI models with the ability to process through multiple options and possibilities, providing more accurate responses.
Conversational AI
The field of generative AI, large language models (LLMs) in particular, has improved greatly over the last several months and has served as the foundational model, said to outperform past algorithms in most natural language and text generation related tasks. Character.AI is using the generative AI and LLM infrastructure within Google Cloud to grow its conversational AI platform. Character.AI is partnering with Google Cloud to combine their AI capabilities, working to enhance customer conversational AI experience through imagination, discovery and understanding.
Character.AI plans to speed up the training and inference of LLMs by using Google Cloud’s Tensor Processor Units (TPUs), which are machine learning (ML) accelerators (2). These scalable resources, used to train and infer AI models, can provide more than one hundred (100) petaflops per pod to accelerate even the most computationally intensive workloads.
In addition, Character.AI expects to utilize Google Cloud’s new A3 VMs running on NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, which boasts up to twenty-six (26) exaflops of AI performance (3). These two resources work together to enable a combination of speed and flexibility between TPUs and GPUs to meet the requirements for almost any AI task.
Character.AI’s core infrastructure currently resides in Google Cloud and utilizes AlloyDB, which is Google Cloud’s PostgreSQL-compatible database (4). Character.AI also plans to deploy Google Cloud Spanner (5) as it has the need to service additional regions.
“We’re offering Google Cloud’s industry leading infrastructure, Google foundation models and AI tooling to companies across industries so they can build, train and deploy the future of AI creatively, reliably and at scale,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. “Character.AI’s cutting-edge conversational AI technology is creating entirely new opportunities to transform how we interact with AI systems, and we are thrilled to be their partner as they continue to scale their vision.”
Character.AI was founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, both former Googlers. According to Google Cloud, Noam’s previous work is central to the current revolution in LLMs, and Daniel’s prior work is related to building large-scale Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep learning programs.
“We’ve recognized the power and strength of Google Cloud’s technology from day one,” said Noam Shazeer, CEO, Character.AI. “As we continue our growth trajectory, working with Google Cloud’s AI technologies was the obvious choice, allowing us to rapidly expand our compute abilities so we can deliver new features and capabilities to millions of users.”
(3) About Google Cloud’s A3 supercomputers with NVIDIA H100 GPUs
(4) About Google Cloud’s AlloyDB
(5) About Google Cloud’s Spanner
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