The headline on the tech news is that Karandeep Anand, the former VP of Business Products at Meta, is now steering the wheel at Character.AI, the leading AI chatbot provider supported by Google. Here's their announcement.

Previously a guide from the board side, Anand is now courageously stepping up to lead as CEO at a transformative time for Character.AI. As they eagerly strive to scale their platform, they're also managing concerns related to child safety. The latter is driven by a recent lawsuit suggesting that the company’s chatbot has had a hand in a tragic circumstance of a 14-year-old boy's death.

On the journey to Character.AI, Anand brings heaps of experience. He ran ad products that reached billions on Meta’s apps, before which he was at Microsoft managing user experience for Azure cloud platform. Before joining Character.AI, he was at the helm of the fintech startup, Brex.

Here's the man of the hour, Karandeep Anand, now the CEO of Character.AI. Image Credits:Character.AI

About 10 months back, Google had whisked away the Character.AI's co-founder and CEO, Noam Shazeer, who used to lead Google's core AI teams. They had also inked a deal with Character.AI on a non-exclusive basis to use its technology. This deal, however, caught attention from the federal regulators due to potential antitrust issues. Similar scrutiny has been received by other reverse acquisitions such as Microsoft’s deal with Inflection.AI.

Character.AI, backed by venture funding of more than $150 million largely from Andreessen Horowitz, is standing on firm financial ground.

In his blog post, Anand shared his initial aim of making safety filters “less overbearing”. He empathised with users' safety concerns, but also voiced that the current scanning process sometimes hindrances harmless content in the app.

In addition to relaxing the safety filters, Anand suggests improving the caliber of Character's AI models. Enhancing memory traits and increasing decision-making transparency are the main goals of AI platforms. He adds that many of these upgrades are in pipeline for delivery within the next 60 days.

The chatbot market, particularly those designed for casual entertainment (Character.AI's forte), is emerging as a formidable playground for generative AI. This surging trend has taken many by surprise. In 2024, most of the company’s users were in the age bracket of 18-24 years (66%) and female (72%), as per data from Sensor Tower.