Both founders left Google eventually so I doubt that CAI’s connected to them in any way (although I wouldn’t be surprised if it was). My gut tells me that they are collecting user data to improve their model so it can be actually marketable in the future.

From their website: "Our dialog agents are powered by our own proprietary technology based on large language models, built and trained from the ground up with conversation in mind.”

There’s very little information about the specific tech behind it, but I’m willing to bet that it’s something on-par with if not better than Google’s LaMDA, seeing as one of the CAI founders launched the project that eventually became LaMDA.