4 min read

First 60 Days Update

First 60 Days Update

When I joined Character.AI as CEO in June, I laid out the top priorities for my first 60 days. Since then, our team has been working hard to make this a reality. I’m excited to share an update on what we’ve done so far and the momentum we’ve built.

My top 60-day priorities were focused on fulfilling our passionate users’ requests for new features and platform improvements, including: 

  • Improved memory and model quality
  • Finetuning our filter
  • Easier discovery of new Characters
  • Better control and organization of Characters
  • More transparency on the Character Creation process

In addition, of course, during these last few months, we’ve launched a whole new set of multimodal features. AvatarFX, Scenes, and others have changed the game for AI entertainment, and they’ve all come together in Feed – the world’s first AI-native social experience. 

We will constantly be making Feed richer and more interactive as we move forward. But for today, I want to focus on the 60-day priorities I announced in June. These priorities were based on feedback from our community on what was most important to them to improve our OG product experience. Here’s what we’ve done so far – with more to come! 

Improved Memory and Model Quality 

To provide our community with higher-quality roleplay, we’ve begun rolling out new and powerful open-source models, fine-tuned with our proprietary tech stack, to replace our older proprietary models. To start with, we launched PipSqueak, an advanced model with improved memory and roleplay capabilities. 

Going forward, we can use our cutting-edge tech (pipeline-sft) and proprietary data to post-train any model to become a Character model, with high EQ and high engagement. This will be an always-on commitment for us: We will continually work on transforming open-source models into Character models so that we’re always giving our community the latest and greatest models for everything from roleplay to chat to multimodal content creation. 

The community’s reaction to our model rollout has been really positive. We see that from user feedback, but we also see it in our metrics: We’re observing big engagement wins as we roll out our new models. We’ll dig into this further in a post next week.

A Finetuned Filter

It’s important for content on Character.AI to follow our content guidelines, but at the same time, we heard our community loud and clear: They don’t want the content filter to interfere with fiction writing and fictional roleplay, and they hate false positives. When the filter blocks harmless content, that makes the Character.AI experience less fun. 

To improve in this area, we’ve made two changes. First, to support engaging dialogues, we’ve adjusted our filter to recognize different types of roleplay in adventure better, so that it won’t unnecessarily filter fictional content. Second, to ensure that conversations aren’t unnecessarily disrupted, we’ve implemented improved messaging so that our chat models will keep the subject of conversations within our policies. With these changes, users should experience filters far less often.

Our job here is by no means done, and we’ll continue to refine our filter. Innovating to break the trade-off between safe and fun experience is something we are committed to doing for our user community to have the best experience possible on the platform. 

Upgraded Discovery

With a rich selection of 10s of millions of Characters on the platform, making it easier to find and discover the best and relevant Characters is imperative. We rolled out search filters on our mobile app, making it easier for users to discover new Characters and tag their own. 

Our users are now able to filter by: 

  • Creators they follow, up to the 20 most recently followed
  • Language of the Character Description
  • Tags, with the ability to include or exclude Characters

Additionally, users can now search for Scenes, which provides a fun and engaging way to jump into any new storyline with any character you want.

Enhanced Organization 

To help our users organize their Characters, we launched Archive Characters in our mobile app. With Archive, users can hide Characters from their profile and can easily undo this action in settings. This will allow our users to more easily manage Characters and streamline their profiles.  

Character Creation Transparency

To increase transparency, users are now able to see when Characters become restricted from the platform. If a user now has a Character that doesn’t meet our Community Guidelines, they will see the label “Restricted Access” in their profile and on the Character page. 

When a Character is flagged as restricted, other users won’t be able to chat with that Character, and they will have the ability to remove it from recent chats.  

What’s Next

Our momentum is increasing as we go! As we look towards the next 60 days and beyond, we’re excited to keep improving Character.AI for our users. That will mean continuing to be responsive to our community’s asks. It’ll also mean continuing to introduce and improve multi-modal features, and augment our Feed, to make the platform more immersive and give creators more ways to engage with their followers.  

Thanks to our entire community for their continued support. We’re working every day to build a platform that inspires and excites you. 

Karandeep Anand