Google is reportedly developing new AI-powered chatbots based on celebrities and YouTube influencers. The idea isn't groundbreaking — startups like Character.ai and companies like Meta offer similar products — but neither are they groundbreaking so far.
Google's Celebrity Chatbot will be powered by the company's Gemini family of large-scale language models. informationThe company is experimenting with partnering with influencers and celebrities, and is also working on a feature that would allow people to create their own chatbots simply by describing their personality and appearance, something Character.ai has already done. Fun fact: Noam Shazeer, one of Character.ai's co-founders, is a former Google engineer and the founder of Transformer, the foundational technology that enabled generative AI today.
It's not yet clear which celebrities or influencers Google will partner with. Meta's chatbots, for example, are modeled after celebrities such as TikTok star Charli D'Amelio, YouTube star Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady and Paris Hilton, while Character.ai's characters include politicians, philosophers, fictional characters and even objects like talking blocks of cheese. Google's project is reportedly being led by veteran exec Ryan Germick, who works on Google Doodles, and a team of 10 people.
It also seems possible that Google's bot is just an experiment: Reports suggest that the bot may only appear on Google Labs, the company's website for experimental products, rather than being made available more widely.
It's not clear why Google is doing this — Meta's celebrity-based AI chatbots never really caught on, despite the company putting them in every product it makes. information As the company pointed out, its chatbot based on Snoop Dogg has just 15,000 followers on Instagram, compared to 87.5 million followers of human rappers.
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