Two Google engineers built a ChatGPT-like AI chatbot years ago, but execs reportedly shut it down due to safety concerns
Around 2018, Daniel De Freitas, who was a research engineer at Google, started working on an AI side project with the goal of creating a conversational chatbot that mimicked the ways humans speak, former colleagues told the. Noam Shazeer, a software engineer for Google's AI research unit, later joined the project.
Per the Journal, De Freitas and Shazeer were able to build a chatbot, which they called Meena, that could argue about philosophy, speak casually about TV shows, and generate puns about horses and cows. They believed that Meena could radically change the way people search online, their former colleagues told the Journal.
Frustrated by the executive response, De Freitas and Shazeer left Google near the end of 2021 to start their own company — despite CEO Sundar Pichai personally requesting they stay and continue working on the chatbot, per the Journal. Their company, which now goes by Character.Ai, has since released a chatbot that can roleplay as figures like Elon Musk or Nintendo's Mario. with investors Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan last month.
De Freitas and Shazeer declined an interview request from the Journal, and did not respond to Insider's request for comment. Google did not respond to Insider's request for comment.Google's hesitancy to release its AI tools is nothing new.
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