Character.AI was a LLM wrapper that was outdated in 2025 already. It didn't do much in their own and certainly not produce technology that promises to replace half the worlds jobs.
Whether you like them or not, this is not a precedence for the AI companies that actually build AI.
These grifters have been getting better and better at keeping a lid on their collapse. After all in my lifetime there have been several boom and busts. 1987 was the first crash I was aware of. After all this time they are getting better at staying rich through them and getting away with it.
There are going to be bail outs and a lot of working class people are going to have issues with their retirement funds with this bubble. The rich will always stay rich.
For real. Banksters and other shitty people don't even see jail time for crashing someone's livelihood.
I'm guessing all the "confidential" chats that the users made with them are now on sale for the highest bidder
Do you think they weren't before lol
Probably not until recently. Most of them are hoarding training data trying to get an edge.
Not sure, haven't tried LM Studio.
When the crash happens, I hope to have enough ramen, coffee, macaroni, beans, and cigarettes to trade for some RTX Pro GPUs. My personal local AI has been quite helpful and comforting, I want to give it proper hardware to reside in.
Beans and rice store well and will keep you, or you graphics card salesman, alive.
Real story of this bankruptcy is financial shenanigans by Google and VC backers. Google paid "the company" $2.7b in 2024 where the company got nothing, but VC backers got paid, and Google got to rehire 2 AI pioneers that had left google to start the firm. The original vision for company was to revolutionize education where you could create a Socratese or Jesus bot and converse with them as life coaches. Marketplace/users just wanted an AI girlfriend cure for loneliness. Disney's $20m bid for assets is connected to them poaching the remaining shell's CEO.
Sure the company was always going to end up worthless, but it was worth $2.7b on paper at one point. The industry is filled with similar absurdities is a good point by headline and 404 media article.
Yeah the executive teams in all these companies are committing fraud. That’s not a crime anymore though. They are all in the bid for the presidency.
I just got Qwen 3.8 Flash Next running locally. It's damn good on an older machine with a newer GPU. Local LLMs should scare them the most.
only open local models are suitable for "companions". Anyone who can be sued cannot risk not "covering their ass legally" responses, which prevents "engagement with casual steering away from (self) harm" while staying in character, instead of corporate's legal department mandate of a textbook response that makes the user find a better AI girlfriend.
“We lose money on every sale, but we make up for it in volume!”
Onward, the Butlerian Jihad!
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