Demand for AI-driven consumer mobile apps has surged recently, exemplified by OpenAI's ChatGPT mobile app, which saw over half a million downloads within six days of its release. Now, another AI player has announced its successful market entry, as Character.AI app, backed by a16z, accumulated more than 1.7 million new installs in less than a week. The company was valued at a staggering $1 billion following its Series A funding round that raised $150 million earlier this year. Character.AI offers users customizable AI companions with unique personalities and the ability to create their own characters.
Interest in Character.AI can be largely attributed to its founders. The platform was created by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, AI experts who previously led a team of researchers at Google, developing LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) – a cutting-edge language model that empowers conversational AI experiences. However, the duo experienced frustration with Google's reluctance to deploy AI chatbots more broadly and make them available to the general public. Convinced that AI had the potential to revolutionize search and other sectors, Shazeer and De Freitas left Google in late 2021 and founded Character Technologies, the parent company of Character.AI.
The mobile version of the Character.AI chatbot platform was launched globally on May 23, immediately garnering significant interest, particularly on Google Play. In the first 48 hours of its launch, the app registered over 700,000 Android installations, surpassing popular entertainment giants like Netflix, Disney+, and Prime Video. This trend has continued post-launch, the company confirmed to TechCrunch, with strong installation numbers coming from major Android markets such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil, and the US.
Fanfare for the mobile app was also boosted by the popularity of the web experience that came before it. Character.AI reported that its web app was already attracting over 200 million monthly visits prior to the mobile app's release, with users spending an average of 29 minutes per visit – an impressive 300% more than ChatGPT. Moreover, users quickly become engaged with the platform after their initial interaction. The company observed that after sending their first message to a character, users' average time on the platform rockets to more than two hours. To date, users have developed over 10 million custom AI characters.
Although the team is comprised of just 30 people, they have been incredibly active this month. They recently introduced their premium service, c.ai+, which shares similar features with ChatGPT Plus, such as faster response times, access during peak usage hours, and early access to new features. Additionally, Character.AI announced a strategic partnership with Google Cloud for building and training its AI models. The collaboration will leverage Google Cloud's Tensor Processor Units to train and infer LLMs (large language models) faster and more efficiently.
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