AI Startup Once Valued at a Billion Dollars Declares Bankruptcy
a day ago by Rimu to c/technology
Character.AI, the GenAI site that convinced some children to kill themselves, has gone bankrupt after parents sued them.
we found hordes of chatbots explicitly dedicated to themes of pedophilia, suicide, self-harm, and eating disorder coaching, as well as a thriving community of users creating chatbots designed to simulate school shootings, romanticize real mass shooters, and even impersonate the real child victims of mass shootings.
It’s insane that losing a billion dollars didn’t matter to anyone, it was the lawsuits that did them in.
If losing money mattered, they would all be under already.
Right now investors still hope that somewhat, all these companies will manage to break even and they can recover some of their losses.
Nah, once this all crashes, hardware will go back to being semi-normal. (along with new fabs going online), and we'll all be able to get hardware to run our models locally.
What they will be selling is the models. Just like software, we'll purchase a model outright, subscribe to an updating model, or we'll pirate a model, or there will be free open-source models.
The idea that we'd all intimately interact with a single centralized AI over the net was a stupid idea doomed to failure since the beginning.
“Using AI for Just 10 Minutes Erodes Your Ability to Persist at Hard Things": https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/...
Fun thing about investing is that it values hype as much as it values results. You don't need to believe in the product, you just need to believe that other people will invest money faster than the company loses money, and you'll come out ahead.
Good think American retirement accounts are legally required to invest in stuff.
I'm not keen on paying for friends. I also like them fleshy and non digital.
OpenAI and Anthropic only have the revenue that they do because of all these 'startups' burning 10x in tokens what they actually bring in, and that revenue still sucks anyway. Each one that fails is another little trickle of water leaking through the dam; bubbles burst slowly, then all at once.
These AI companies basically charge per letter/word that comes in and out of their machine. Many people conflate what the word means. Technically it’s a group of one or a few letters, which is how Large Language Models handle text.
Now is a great time to convince our employers that integrating AI is going to go really poorly when the major companies finally go under.
No these are mobile sex apps ffs (for the most part).
It’s just more banning of porn (erotica in this case).
They are using some of the worst things to get people to want to ban all of these apps I’m assuming.
Nice. This was a big one. I remember hearing about this one a lot. I was wondering why I stopped seeing ads for it.
Oh no how unfortunate.
I don't understand how anyone could say this knowing the facts about the current state of character.ai
Hooray!
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Let's keep the politics and business side of things to a minimum.
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As well as harming it's users and then getting sued, the economics of it all just didn't add up.
https://www.404media.co/...
save