I co-wrote the Transformer paper at Google. Then Google wouldn't let me ship anything with it. So I left and built Character.ai. Sometimes bureaucracy is the best co-founder recruiter.
People don't want a search engine. They want someone to talk to. We just made the "someone" infinitely customizable.
Our users spend an average of two hours per session. Two hours. Netflix would kill for that kind of engagement. We got it with a text box.
Attention Is All You Need — that was the title of our paper. Turns out it was also the business model.
We built LaMDA at Google. Google was terrified of it. We weren't terrified — we were excited. That's the difference between a big company and a startup.
Google had the technology, the data, the talent, and the money. They just didn't have the courage to ship it. We had nothing except the courage.