A new AI platform founded by ex-Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas with over 10 million fictitious avatars based on real-life personalities, gained two million downloads in its first week of availability.
It allows users to mimic talks with historical and contemporary individuals such as Billie Eilish, Donald Trump, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Users may converse, discuss, and even send instructions to avatars such as Elon Musk. However, having romantic or erotic ties with the characters is expressly forbidden by the program.
In terms of user engagement, it is said to exceed ChatGPT, with users staying on the site three to five times longer. After sending their first message, users’ engagement rates increased significantly, with an average time spent on the site reaching two hours. Users have also built over 10 million customized AI characters, and they m spend an average of 29 minutes every visit, which is equivalent to the time spent on popular social networking sites.
Despite its remarkable success, Character.ai claims to have achieved its initial installs organically, without relying on a dedicated marketing budget.
The sources for this piece include an article in Axios.