This week we are, as promised, going to talk about AI. And Wu Nelli, do we have a great guest. He's the founder of a startup called Character.ai which is in the process of raising a reported $250 million at a $1 billion valuation. Gnome Shazir spent roughly two decades at Google where he would start out as employee number 200. But with a simple prompt, you can effectively create any character you want from Joe Biden to an AI therapist,. A new best friend, even a girlfriend. It's all pretty wild. You can listen to us for free on the Times Radio app or wherever else you get your podcasts.
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Noam Shazeer, founder of Character.ai, to talk about his work at Google (4:00), joining the search giant in 2000 (6:50), what is deep learning (5:10), starting on language models in 2015 (9:10), starting the company in 2021 (10:50), virtual therapists (15:00), monetizing (20:40), what is possible (23:00), growing up coding and doing maths (31:00), winning the international Math Olympiad (32:20), how this compares to the Internet itself (34:30).
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.