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For all intents and purposes Character.ai was acquired in August 2024, and this is just the mess leftover from their run around antitrust regulation.

The company filing for chapter 11 today is shell that was left after Google "hi-quired" (the opposite of acqui-hired) the founding team. The shareholders got paid ($2.7B from Google), the founding team moved on, and what's left is the corporate structure and whoever Google did not want.

It sucks for the people left over (but then again, it also sucks to be part of the team that's laid off in a merger). It's also a terrible practice that I hope the Justice department and the CFTC will put an end to soon.

BERT need to be fine tuned for your use case, Jev generalizes. It’s a pretty big difference!

Most valuable comment here. You can fine tune BERT to perform really well on classification tasks. What's exciting about Jev is that it generalizes. Laya does not!

Interesting result, but the writing is very poor.

I agree that from the perspective of a business owner this would seem very normal. "I need legal services for X, and I happen to know and trust a very good outside counsel for this" is very normal. Additionally, law firms have super robust conflict of interest policies so you can expect this would have been reviewed in details.

However, I think this story brings up two important topics:

1. It is important that high level government officials avoid not just actual conflicts of interest but also the APPEARANCE of a conflict of interest.

2. The Trump administration has taken a much more liberal approach to conflicts of interest than most admins, and this has undermined trust in government. The fact that this story got people so riled up is a great illustration of it. This is not good for the country!

The demand signals never allocated the resources, a small number of people always did. Those people react to the demand signals (and they still do).

IMO a more important question is: what happens when the market power of a segment of society grows much greater than the rest? In a "K-shaped" economy, the top 20% have so much spending power (and even more future spending power) than their demand signals can overwhelm the rest. Then IMO the market won't respond to the demand signals of the bottom 20% and capitalism stops working for all. Add to that the possibility of AI automating more and more work and you have a system that only works for folks at the tops.

This isn't a resource allocation problem! it's a purchasing power distribution problem.

Less progressive than in the USA, believe it or not…

I would take the other side of that bet. In five years, there won’t be more outages than today.

I think most business will decline to do any further business with you after you threaten to sue them. There are even patent licenses that automatically get voided in the event you sue your counterparty for any reason.

the number of companies using local AI for development is too small to draw any conclusions from.

I have a simple list: money, medication, identification, underwear, bathing suit. Everything else you can figure out.

Deals of this type are usually cash free and debt free. The cash went to the shareholders. Hence the implied valuation of $2.5B.