Daniel De Freitas

Daniel De Freitas is a Brazilian computer scientist and entrepreneur specializing in conversational artificial intelligence. He is a co-founder of Character.AI, a chatbot platform, and is credited as a creator of Google's LaMDA language model and its predecessor Meena. As of 2026, he is a research scientist at Google DeepMind.

Early life and education De Freitas was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and earned a degree in computer engineering from the University of São Paulo (USP). He later completed coursework in machine learning and deep learning at Stanford University. He joined Microsoft in 2012, working on search and question-answering systems for Bing, and moved to Google in 2016, where he initially worked on machine learning for YouTube.

Return to Google In August 2024, Google signed an agreement reportedly worth about $2.7 billion that granted it a non-exclusive license to Character.AI's model technology and brought De Freitas, Shazeer, and a group of their researchers back to Google DeepMind. De Freitas rejoined DeepMind as a research scientist focused on dialogue and assistant systems, while Character.AI continued operating as an independent company. The deal's structure drew regulatory attention: in May 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a civil antitrust investigation into whether such licensing-and-talent arrangements were designed to avoid formal merger review. The investigation was still ongoing as of early 2026. In June 2026, Shazeer left Google for OpenAI, while De Freitas remained at Google DeepMind.

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