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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I haven't really kept up, but it looks like Character's business model was still focused on NSFW content. If so, then this is also a disaster for the industry at large, since NSFW content is one of the few genuine money-printers for chatbot and image-generation services; people really do want thousands of iterations of the same fantasy, slightly changed in order to stay engaging, and Character was highly recommended as a source of affordable slop. (Examples of unaffordability include the rampant free-tier abuse on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok; I'm assuming that customers are willing to open their wallets at least a little. In general, the porn industry turns a profit, so I do think that people will pay for porn.)
My prior estimate (previously, on Awful and on Lobsters) was that token generation was subsidized to the tune of an effective 80-90% discount; this looks to be more in the 90-95% range. For contrast, consider chatbot-booster Willison's belief, in reply above, that Chinese labs will magically produce a five-fold improvement in token production; this still would be between two to four times slower than needed to turn a profit for Character.