AI chatbot startup Character is looking to secure $250M in new funding to reach unicorn status.   The company has met with several VC firms and may seek partnerships with cloud computing companies.  Character was founded by two former Google researchers, Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who worked on Google’s LaMDA, a family of conversational neural language models.  The startup offers a free service that lets users create characters that they can interact with. These chat box characters can take on the role of celebrities, historical figures, and video game/film characters. Some options include Elon Musk, President Joe Biden, Albert Einstein, and various Pokemon characters.  The startup is looking to take advantage of the traction gained by Open AI’s ChatGPT chatbot following its new partnership and $10B investment from Microsoft.  The startup wants to gauge its success among users before committing to a specific plan to raise capital. Computing costs represent the bulk of Character’s expenses, which may lead the startup to pursue deals with cloud computing providers, such as AWS or Google Cloud.