Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer, co-founders of Character.AI, rejoined Google's AI unit DeepMind, two years after leaving their engineering roles to launch the startup. This move was part of a licensing agreement for Character.AI's technology.
About Daniel De Freitas
Daniel De Freitas is a prominent AI researcher and entrepreneur, currently serving as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He is the co-founder and former President of Character.AI, a popular conversational AI platform. Prior to Character.AI, he was a key figure at Google, where he started and led the development of the groundbreaking conversational AI models Meena and LaMDA at Google Brain.
Education
Engineer's degree
Engineer's degree - Computer Engineering
CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition
CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition
CS224d: Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing
CS224d: Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing
CS229: Machine Learning
CS229: Machine Learning
Work Experience
Research Scientist
Research Scientist
President / Co-founder
President and co-founder at www.Character.AI - worked towards giving every person on earth access to their own deeply personalized superintelligence to help them live their best lives!
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/science/character-ai-chatbot-intelligence.html
https://Character.AI lets you create and talk to advanced AI (language tutors, text adventure games, celebrities, talking animals + more).
Senior Staff Software Engineer
Led LaMDA at Google Brain.
LaMDA in Sundar's Keynote: https://youtu.be/Mlk888FiI8A?t=995 Senior Staff Software Engineer
Staff Research Engineer
Started and led LaMDA at Google Brain.
LaMDA in Sundar's Keynote: https://youtu.be/Mlk888FiI8A?t=995
https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/lamda
Google Brain: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/ai-researchers-desks-boss.html
Also published about Meena:
https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA0vHYzGR8s Staff Research Engineer Oct 2020 - Oct 2021 · 1 yr 1 mo
Senior Research Engineer
Started and led Project Meena (later renamed to LaMDA), open-domain conversational AI research, at Google Brain.
Article: https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/28/meena-is-googles-attempt-at-making-true-conversational-ai/
More news articles: https://www.google.com/search?q=meena+chatbot&tbm=nws
Blog post: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.09977 Senior Research Engineer
Senior Software Engineer
Machine Learning modeling/experimentation and serving at Google scale applied to text and video understanding for YouTube in production. Senior Software Engineer
Software Engineer III
Machine Learning modeling/experimentation and serving at Google scale applied to text and video understanding for YouTube in production. Software Engineer III Dec 2016 - Apr 2018 · 1 yr 5 mos
Software Engineer II
Worked on very large-scale Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning for Automatic Open Domain Question answering that shows at the top of Bing results.
Example output: https://www.bing.com/search?q=seabiscuit+burial+site Software Engineer II
Software Engineer II
Designed and implemented first version of the recommender system to empower users of the Microsoft Project Services solution built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Software Engineer II Sep 2014 - Dec 2015 · 1 yr 4 mos
Software Engineer
Designed and implemented advanced project management tools that enable project managers to easily create detailed Work Breakdown Structures (aka WBS) which are seamlessly integrated with project accounting and resource management features. Built for the Service Industries module in Microsoft Dynamics AX. Software Engineer Oct 2012 - Sep 2014 · 2 yrs
Technical Expertise
Daniel De Freitas possesses deep expertise in the full lifecycle of AI development, from foundational research in conversational models like LaMDA and Meena to the commercial scaling of consumer-facing AI products at Character.AI. His technical skills span core software engineering, large-scale machine learning, and natural language processing.
Machine Learning
Deep Learning
Natural Language Processing
Artificial Neural Networks
Natural Language Understanding
Natural Language Generation
Computer Vision
Software Engineering
Software Development
Python
C++
C#
Java
TensorFlow
Keras
Big Data Analytics
Big Data
Algorithms
Database Design
Web Development
Design Patterns
Microsoft Dynamics AX
Microsoft CRM
SQL
Key Achievements
Recognized for high potential and leadership capabilities within Microsoft's development organization.
Awarded for the best graduation engineering project for the creation of an autonomous delivery robot.
Media Coverage
Mr. Shazeer and Mr. De Freitas, who co-founded Character.AI and raised nearly $200 million, announced their return to Google, highlighting a trend of AI founders jumping ship for Big Tech.
The article discusses the return of Google defectors Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas to Google DeepMind, leaving Character.AI, the AGI company they co-founded in 2021, in a reported $2.5 billion deal.
The report details how Google engineers, including Daniel De Freitas, had developed a ChatGPT-like AI (Meena/LaMDA) years ago as a side project while he was working on YouTube-related AI.


