Founder Profile
Daniel De Freitas
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Daniel De Freitas?
Daniel De Freitas is a founder of Character.ai, which was founded in 2021 with Noam Shazeer.
- Company founded
- Character.ai
- Founded
- 2021
- Co-founders
- Noam Shazeer
Background
Brazilian-born software engineer who, at Google, started the chatbot project that became Meena and later LaMDA.
Founding Story
Daniel De Freitas co-founded Character.ai in 2021 and served as its President. He had begun Google's open-domain chatbot work as a side project, which grew into Meena and LaMDA. He returned to Google DeepMind in August 2024 as part of the licensing deal.
De Freitas is a Brazilian computer scientist who specialises in conversational artificial intelligence. He is credited as a creator of Google's LaMDA language model and its predecessor Meena, and as of 2026 he is a research scientist at Google DeepMind.