AI chatbot startup Character is in talks with investors to raise $250M in funding.  The San Francisco-based startup — established by two former Google researchers, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas — met up with several VC firms, including Sequoia Capital. The majority of the funding will be diverted toward cloud-computing costs. However, sources confirmed that the firm is also looking to ink deals with cloud-computing providers.  Per The Information, the firm is targeting a unicorn valuation of over $1B at the funding round.  Final deal terms and size may change since discussions are still in the very early stages and the company's platform is currently in beta.  Character's platform can create chatbots that mimic celebrities and film characters.  The firm previously raised an undisclosed sum through a seed round from A Capital, Elad Gil, SV Angel, Paul Buchheit, and Nat Friedman.  At Google, Shazeer and Freitas were instrumental in developing the LaMDA language model.  Character's peers Anthropic and Adept AI are looking to raise new capital at $5B and $1B valuation, respectively.