character-ai
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Daniel De Freitas and the Long Road to a Talking Machine
At nine, Daniel De Freitas tried to teach a computer to talk. Two decades later, his work on Meena and LaMDA helped turn that childhood question into Character.AI.
Karandeep Anand Is Turning the Chatbot Into a Story World
After two decades building platforms at Microsoft, Meta, and Brex, Karandeep Anand has a new product brief: make AI entertainment feel less like a prompt box and more like a world people can enter.
Sophia Luo
Sophia Luo is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where she backs early-stage founders building AI-native applications and enabling infrastructure. A Bay Area native who triple-majored at MIT in four years, she was a nationally ranked chess player by age eight and carried that competitive instinct into the AI startup world - first as an early engineer at Scale AI, then as a founding product engineer at Character.AI. She joined Greylock in 2024, made angel bets on Cognition and Mercor before they were household names, and landed on the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in venture capital within her first year as an investor.