Character.ai files for bankruptcy, agrees to sell some assets for $20M

This doesn't feel as much of a bellwether as I have seen celebrated than the cold fact that if you make it hard for teens to have relationships and sex with your chatbots [1], they will jump to the next boat. Character.AI has survived long enough to enjoy the squeeze in lawsuits, but the way users talk about these services always feels very much as fly-by-night as nudify apps: extract what you can, while you can, before it goes away or gets sanitized by restrictions.

Disney showing up here again after their Sora flirt is interesting, to say the least.

[1] https://blog.character.ai/u18-chat-announcement/, https://blog.character.ai/an-update-on-changes-to-our-under-...

Anything that can be mass produced will be. Software will be mass produced. I get why so many people have problem with AI. Coding is a craft, and that craft is well paid, but now it will be industralized. With that said I expect bumps in the road. What it looks like these AI companies have no durable moats. One week Opus is the best, next week its Sol. Then its Muse or whatever. Models are a commodity. Then there is a problem of chinese openweights gaining significant market share, and China actually is able to power up cheaply their datacenter unlike US, which has an aging infrastructure.

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50068036

I wonder if this will be the first in a string of many..

is this the pets.com moment