2 years in, the founders and 30 researchers took Google's $2.7b and left. Then they had to ban kids which was probably most of their userbase. Yet they were still putting $1m/mo on the corporate cards with 86 full time bay area employees on
~$278k average base, and almost $100k owed to DoorDash. lol
Sometimes watching the fresh-faced punks make bank while I slave away at a "regular" company for average pay is just demoralizing. It's really about being at the right place, time, and near the right people, isn't it.
Nothing except the $278k average base salary, while living luxuriously at work and probably home too on the startup's expense card, as the $100k door dash bill shows. I bet there were a ton of fancy off sites in Hawaii or wherever.
Meanwhile at $bigco I just got my request to buy a shitty $1k Dell laptop denied because I got one 2 years ago and I have to wait 1 more.
I remember the laptop renewal also was 3 years. Which would have been fine if they didn't have that policy to issue Dell Latitude, end of the barrel hardware Dell itself couldn't sell.
One day I figured nobody forces me to work for such company.
Elon is the richest person on earth and he doesn't seem particularly happy. Trump is the most powerful and hate-tweets himself to sleep every night. Zuckerberg seems to be his happiest doing sport and spending time with his family.
They were clearly in it for the investor perks and not the product, spending away like that.
If you want an unsustainable joyride, then you too can work for a startup headed for chapter 11 (like 8 out of 10 startups).
Also, knowing people in general has never not been valuable. It's arguably the main thing holding most engineers back from success. Plenty of evidence backs this up: Type fewer keys, press more palms.
A lot of that depends on how you do with the birth lottery. The path from Westchester to Stanford is a little easier than from a homeless shelter (that was MY life).
While I understand and have shared that sentiment, this is a classic "is versus ought" trap. It ought to be the case that sheer technical skills can carry you. It is the case that they can't. This is generally true for just about every job in the human experience.
If nothing else, those human connections can be the difference in outcomes when you inevitably screw up. If you've invested in relationships, when you make a mistake, it's more likely someone will say "bluefirebrand means well, and I can see how their good intentions led to this outcome. Let's figure out how to fix this so it won't happen again to them or anyone else." If no one at work knows you except as the person who sits off to the side and never talks to their coworkers, the response may very well be "bluefirebrand who? Alright, let HR know we need to hire a replacement."
Again, it ought to be the case that none of that matters, and everyone is treated the same regardless of their personal network. But it is the case that this isn't how the world works, and it's not reasonable to wish it otherwise. I mean, are you as likely to help a stranger as a friend even if their needs are identical? Most people would say no.
I'm fairly nerdy (or rather, a reformed nerd?) and I haven't met a single "supposedly socially awkward weirdo" person who doesn't have a spark in their eye or who can't ever say anything funny or who can't make a very astute observation that only they end up being qualified to make. Recognize that you are a universe unto yourself and that SOMEone else will notice that.
It’s neither fine nor un-fine, just not unjust. It just is. In all arrangements involving humans, the outcome’s better if the other participants like you. We’re social animals.
The thing is, if you were already in the crowd that gets offers to work at this sort of startup, you could be drawing the same 250k+ to work a normal 9-5 at a FAANG-adjacent
Signing on to a hookers-and-blow startup is a choice a lot of these folks made, not their only route to money
Correction: FAANG salaries are almost always better. You get a lot more equity with startups. It’s a gamble. You’re betting a short term paycut on the company’s success.
But the main reason I’d generally work at startups anyway is because it’s more fun. When something needs to be done, you can’t contact the department that does the thing. You are that department; go figure it out!
And yes, that’s also a lot more pressure, but I wouldn’t trade it for a 9-5 desk job. (Other people absolutely would, and do. I never criticize their decision making. That’s what’s right for them. It’s just not what’s right for me.)
Bullshit. I met a lot of my favorite people in the world working in startups, people I want to stay in contact with for life because they’re good and I enjoy being around them.
There are bad and good people everywhere. I’ve seen new fewer good people at small companies than large or non-tech ones.
This is the way tech has always been. Or as Carlin said "It's a big club... And you ain't in it."
Occasionally, you can ride their coattails (there will always be rising tides), but if you don't have the right connections and the right degrees from the right universities, you're not invited to the box seat TLA titles of these things...
The odds are much better than state lotteries, and the payout is higher than the stock market, but most of us still need to do our own financial planning instead of socializing the risks of the founder class as they privatize the gains. And yet, each day I get these ludicrous emails from a16z about which startups started by which all star founders wants to hire me for less than I make from passive revenue these days for bread crumbs of equity.
But the thing here is, who needs character.ai in an age of local models and cheap tokens from OpenAI and Anthropic (unless you're very naughty and not shaming, just noting)? High margin role play disrupted by cheap open weight models: how very Clayton Christensen.
The people making bank are those creating these startups.
Their startups get acquired, or they get acqui-hired because of the founders and core people, who in turn have some pedigree which send strong signals.
If you look at the pattern, it is roughly:
- Top ML/AI researchers from the past 10-15 years
- Top ML/AI engineers from top labs or companies
Those above people were hired by FAANG companies or AI startups.
But most important of all, it isn't a overnight success. Many of these have been going at it for 10+ years now. Of course some are relatively young, as in having joined Anthropic or OpenAI more recently (past few years), and launching their own startup after 2022.
> It's really about being at the right place, time, and near the right people, isn't it
It's also about having the right moral flexibility. To be in this particular club, you have to hang out with some people that a bunch of us would really rather not be associated with...
It's always been like that. I happened to get in with the right people at the right time and rode that momentum my whole career, despite graduating from a third tier state school.
All I can say is if you want in, you have to maximize your surface area for luck. There's a lot written about that concept but it's the basic underpinning of my success personally. I just rolled the dice way more times than most people.
Normally I’m skeptical of this kind of schadenfreude, but if $1m/mo is a real number, that’s $11k per employee. I really hope they were running inference through the cards or something.
”Character.ai’s CEO Karandeep Anand is joining Disney in a newly created role as Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. Karan expects to be joined by members of Character’s technical team to build on Disney’s impressive technology capabilities to help connect fans worldwide with its beloved stories and characters in new and innovative ways.”
At least Anand has been in the business for like 30 years. I didn't know anything about him but I assumed he was a 25 year old from Stanford that VCs decided to shower money on
Sets up the most vile company preying on lonely people, runs it into the ground - then gets hired to do the exact same thing for a bigger company. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it
He didn't really run it into the ground, this whole bankruptcy thing is just smoke and mirrors to cover the fact that Google basically acquired them ages ago
I understand the argument for protecting the children from the harms, but why should we have such arguments around “lonely people”? It’s just adults consuming media tailored to their needs. I can’t see it being worse than “IG/TikTok ruining an adult’s perception of reality”, or “Tinder focusing on return-users metrics”.
Character.ai (business model Uber for AI psychosis) takes near 3 billion bag and files for bankruptcy in a move to getting up with the best practices of the big boys of entertainment, as ex character ai ceo moves to Disney (business model: Uber for tax-deductible cultural vandalism and EULA-enforced manslaughter).
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.
And tech billionaires panicked and bankrolled the Republican Party. So, it was working. A shame that the USA has a democracy on sale. Less money in politics could have brought better lives for the average USA citizens.
But splitting big tech is unavoidable as otherwise they will sink the rest of the economy with them (and then it will be split anyway).
It's silly or misleading to imply nothing has changed in this administration compared to the last one with regard to enforcement of laws and regulations. So many laws changed or ignored and regulatory agencies gutted, dropped, or silenced. The very next link on hn after this article for me is about the cftc being told not to investigate certain oil deals.
Please don't try to convince people to accept the current abuses of the system as inevitable or "both sides" when they clearly aren't.
This form of laissez faire capitalism looks equally prominent in Europe at the moment. The problem seems not tied to any particular administration, but rather a culture of the Neo-liberal ideology which is pervasive across the entire capital and the governing classes of the western world (probably even wider).
> Please don't try to convince people to accept the current abuses of the system as inevitable or "both sides" when they clearly aren't.
Please stop only waking up under a Republican administration, or even worse just under the administration of a wrestling valet game show host.
> clearly aren't.
"Oh, please" and "it's just so obvious." If it's so clear, you should have less trouble explaining it than other things. And that doesn't mean explaining the bad things that your enemies do in power, but explaining how your friends weren't doing those things and actively ending them when they were in power.
Clinton did the massive deregulation that defined this century. Obama didn't prosecute anyone for 2008 financial crimes*, let Citigroup pick his cabinet, bailed out the banks, and flooded the stock market with free cash. Biden is literally the Delaware credit card prevent student loans from being discharged in bankruptcy guy, he had great people in Kanter, Khan and Chopra and undermined and ignored them consistently while breaking a railroad strike.
All absolute dirtbags who did what Republicans could have never gotten away with, because partisans who pretend to care fall asleep when Democrats are in power. A lot of consulting firms and nonprofits get flooded with state cash when Democrats are in power, and don't when Republicans are in power (and vice versa.) Patronage is more powerful than ethics when it comes to the middle class.
[*] Or for a worldwide torture network, or the people who admitted destroying evidence of the worldwide torture network. Or for the intentional lies that began two Middle East wars.
> Or for a worldwide torture network, or the people who admitted destroying evidence of the worldwide torture network. Or for the intentional lies that began two Middle East wars.
I think they mean rather than acqui-hire, acquiring in order to hire the team. They hired the team they wanted individually to specifically avoid acquiring this company.
Poaching is when one illegally hunts wildlife. People are not animals, and hiring them is not harming them. It is a terrible term to apply to human beings.
Most people know what poaching means without making that association. It’s a perfectly legitimate term across all forms of employment, in both negative and positive contexts.
Do we also need to retire ‘head hunting’, because it brings to mind cartoonishly outdated notions of savagery?
Within the employment context, is it ever a negative? Only from the perspective of the competitor? But to society as a whole, "poaching" (hiring) employees is clearly a massive win.
There are many thousands of words that mean more than one thing. If you go out of your way to deliberately misapply one meaning to another, in a way that's offensive, that's on you. Nobody's asking or forcing you to do that.
Do you object if someone says, "I adopted a new strategy"? After all, children are adopted, and one could say that using this phrase trivializes a deeply important human relationship.
Do you object if someone says, "She's a fan of my work"? After all, a fan is a machine that blows air. It could be said that referring to a person as a fan reduces them to an appliance whose purpose is to serve someone else.
Do you object if someone says, "I have a date tonight"? After all, a date is a fruit. Someone could say that calling a romantic partner a "date" is to objectify them and reduce them to something consumed for pleasure.
To clarify, what I am objecting to is taking a term for something with a massive negative societal impact, and trying to apply it to something that has a massive societal positive impact, in order to make the positive thing sound like a negative thing. I am all for the evolution of language, especially when it serves society.
> To clarify, what I am objecting to is taking a term for something with a massive negative societal impact, and trying to apply it to something...
No one is "taking a term" and "trying to apply" it to anything. The word has multiple meanings/uses, full stop.
What you are objecting to is one of its meanings (attracting employees from a competitor), because you don't like the negative connotation of another of its meanings (stealing game). And that's because you believe that the latter meaning's negative connotation will make the former also feel more negative. But I submit that that's just in your head, and the heads of a few others, and the vast majority of people are able to keep two definitions quite separate.
Gutted. Poached is a bad word for it which already describes a different thing that is a component of this thing. If you can combine "poach" and acquire in a witty way, go for it.
"Hi-quired," although not sonorous, is at least a new word for a specific thing, instead of a word for a closely related thing that would just confuse anyone who heard it. I might've just gone for "Hire-quired" because it's obvious what it means and it seems a little bit easier to say.
If you hire the core of a company that constitutes its competitive advantage and abandon the corporate shell and its looming legal liabilities, you might have just hi-quired a business.
I think the original meaning of hi-quired was hijacked-acquired, in the sense that the company was acquihired, all the critical talent transitioned to a more important G project and that's it.
it's people just trying to be smart here. You are either acquired (bought for mostly the product, whoever wants to leave is inconsequential), or acquihired (bought also to absorb the talent pool, so it is contingent on some personnel staying on).
All this other stuff people are trying to make up falls under those two when a company buys another.
Mike Levine (a financial blogger for Bloomberg) says the industry is calling these sorts of transactions "reverse acqui-hires" to distinguish them from a normal (forward) acquihire where the acquirer buys the whole company even if all it wants is the people. He discusses some of the advantages and legalities here:
Not clear that this is true financially. Of course, it sucks to be at a sinking ship, but in most of these the people left behind are compensated as both employees and shareholders.
Equity holders have a more junior claim than debt holders, but if there are enough dollars in the bankrupt company to make the debt holders whole, the equity holders get whatever is left over (obviously in order of seniority).
There was a Supreme Court case that essentially established that Common stockholders can be practically ignored as part of leadership’s fiduciary duty. It revolved around an ex-employee suing for compensation for Common stock after a merger that paid out the CEO and preferred shareholders, leaving stockholders zero.
This is also partially why your common stock options can be valued significantly less than the price the company value would imply: because it’s not an even share in the business.
Assuming you're talking about the Trados Inc litigation, the situation was:
* Raised 52m
* Acquired for 52m
* 8m paid to exec team to stay in place
* Common stock got zero
The lawsuit determined that the board did have a fiduciary duty to the common stock, but that the common stock had no economic value, so they were not actually being harmed here, aka this is basically the best deal the company could have gotten, but it didn't clear the pref stack.
In the Groq/Character deals, they very obviously cleared the pref stack, so common stock deserves to get a piece of the licensing deal at the rate of the stock they held. It's annoying because its a dividend and doesn't benefit from QSBS, etc, but common stock is getting paid there.
I swear this is what's so risky about AI startups, they've completely changed the risk/reward calculus that we all used to be okay with.
You join a company, are granted ISOs/RSUs/etc, and they matter at some point when a liquidity event happens.
Now the liquidity events are "acquihireasitions", the execs and senior AI/ML eng get buyouts to go to a new company -- everyone else: regular eng, designers, PMs, marketers, recruiting, etc. everyone else is just left with nothing.
I wouldn't join an AI startup unless I was on the ML side, and I'm not: I'm just a "regular ass product engineer" so screw me I guess.
Any such ban would be in direct conflict with California law (where I assume Character.ai, as a company founded by Xooglers living in Palo Alto is based), under the same logic that forbids non-competes. California has created one of the most prosperous countries in the world under a framework where you actually have to entice your employees not to leave, rather than shackling them to their workstations, and I would be extremely opposed to any attempt to change that.
I don't think banning these type of psuedo-acquisitions runs counter to non-competes. I posted the other day about Augment, which I believe did the same thing.
"if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's probably a duck" should apply to acquisitions. These types of acquisitions leave employees (+ other shareholders) holding the bag. It should be illegal.
> California has created one of the most prosperous countries in the world...
Along with the rest of the top 5 states where almost everyone lives in the USA?
Have you ever even lived for a significant amount of time outside of California? Ever try New York, Texas, or Florida? Nobody is "shackled to their workstation" there either. California leads in unaffordable living and wealth inequality, and it's not even because those on top in California are living any better than even the upper middle class elsewhere.
The economy is much more than tech and most of those businesses are not in California and don't want to be.
Yes, I have lived outside of California. It mostly made me more appreciative of this state, with the notably exceptions of last call and gun laws.
Noncompete "agreements" are evil and run counter to every redeeming quality that a free market economy has. If your state allows them, they are in favor of indentured servitude, plain and simple. In contrast, California stands as a beacon for those who refuse such chains. We don't just ban noncompetes in California, we actively liberate those who move here from their out-of-state noncompetes.
And contrary to what you'll read on here, California is not just tech. We've got a massive agriculture industry (more than 50% of the country's produce), several of the best universities in the world, the entire entertainment industry (to such a degree that we're killing everyone's accents), one of the top financial sectors, and the largest manufacturing industry in the country. Hell, our restaurants are better than anywhere else in the country: I can walk down the street walk past multiple restaurants that would be the best in the entire state in most of the rest of the country, to a point that I take it for granted until I walk into a random restaurant in the heartland somewhere and expect it to be good.
We treat our companies well and our residents better. Hell, we even treat our non-residents better than any other state, given that our taxes subsidize the existence of the parasitic 41.
When the worst thing about your state is a housing shortage due to everyone wanting to be there, that's glowing praise.
Yes, California has pretty much all its eggs in one basket. That was my original point. I wouldn't be proud of numbers just for the sake of them, especially when they're not my numbers.
As I mentioned in my other comment, California is far from just tech companies. You could wipe out the entire information sector and California would still be the most prosperous state in the US. California is practically the only US state to have a fully diversified economy.
I'm not very familiar with the US legal system, but doesn't Federal Law override any state law if there is conflict? Presumably any antitrust action taken by DOJ would be in accordance with federal law, so the state laws shouldn't matter?
> where you actually have to entice your employees not to leave
Yes, by offering them things like equity in the company. This practice throws all that out the window though, in essence unilaterally renegotiating the terms of employment. When the leadership team can be acquired independently of the company then these employees can be left with nothing. Sometimes the corp doing the acquisition will throw a bone to the dregs left, but that does not appear to be legally required. It's exploitative and unjust.
was it a run around of anti-trust or character's liabilities? It will be interesting if there are creditor lawsuits / trustee clawbacks in the future around these deals.
by using some inane term like "hi-quired" instead of using a few words to explain what happened, you left everyone confused and spawned a bunch of discussion about what "hi-quired" means.
very smart. very good terminology invented by someone who, i'm sure, has lots of blog followers.
character.ai - the tobacco company AI equivalent - who's business model it was to lull users in with highly-unstable AI 'friends', which was a bad idea from the start as most normal thinking people would assume, yet predatory VCs funded that shitshow and that far too long, and many scandals and even suicides followed from it that could have been avoided. Companies and their executives must be held personally accountable for knowingly detrimental effects on society and their users - that's the only way regulation for the benefit of users actually works.
It's a real disgrace that companies like Google and Disney acquired people from them - it displays those companies' true values and motives: profit at any fckin human prize.
Disney. You mean the company that hid an image of topless woman in The Rescuers (1977) movie and from which many child stars have gone off the rails in later life, main actor kissing a 11 old in Blank Check (1994), and the 2026 lawsuit by Raquel Lee Bolleau among other scandals that anyone as a parent would hope not to be there
> the company that hid an image of topless woman in The Rescuers (1977) movie
Disney is guilty of a lot of crap—everything else that you mentioned and much more—but that specific instance wasn’t their fault and they acted to correct it once they knew.
Again, I’m not here to defend Disney, they definitely are rotten, but we can point that out by listing all the things they definitely did badly and on purpose rather than leaning on dubious situations which weaken the argument.
These are thin wrappers over LLMs (specifically, C.AI’s proprietary models). Claiming they are equivalent to tobacco companies fails to understand and in fact minimizes the reality here. If you truly cared about child suicide and weren't just playing up an emotional role, you’d seek to learn how these situations came about.
LLMs are “yes men," and they will on average agree with you with enough arguing. Go chat with one about a fight you had or even make one up and watch as it soothes and supports you. In fact, I put my finished argument into an LLM and opened two different chats and spoke to it in both of our perspectives, and depending on who was prompting it, it claimed the prompter was “right”.
Now, with that in mind, consider the situation: a youth already feels depressed; they talk to the chatbot and, after enough talking, the chatbot is agreeing with them because that is the “probable” mix of tokens. This is platform-agnostic, because it is a fundamental aspect of LLMs. So any value judgment you apply to C.AI specifically must be forwarded to every company, because I have seen, heard, and even made custom roleplay cards with every vendor.
Suicides are unfortunate, but even if the LLMs had a role to play, there’s like what, one confirmed case for C.AI’s entire user base? Even if we assume that was only the “known” cases and assume that there are actually closer to 3000 out of their +30 million user base, then that’s basically the chance of being struck by lightning and is below the standard rate of suicide per the CDC.
There simply is not strong evidence that LLMs are likely to increase suicides, and while they can be a vector for those with underlying issues, so can anything else. People have committed suicide over cartoons, radio shows, books, TikTok trends, and losing game consoles, and certainly not to mention social media.
In short, the advent of LLM chatbots is not strongly correlated to an increased suicide risk, and instead it was an unfortunate situation sensationalized for the eyes of the public by the media. If you wish to push your outrage at anyone, do it at the people who profited off of the suicide and not the company that was picked apart in the process.
Sorry, but that's just a silly comment. There are many many things causing suicide, including things like celebrities dying or marrying. Should that now be outlawed?
Talking about suicide can cause people to commit suicide, should it be outlawed?
And there were books banned for similar ideas and society at large decided that in most cases it's overreacting and does more harm than good.
Yes, I'd do everything for children to not die, but I wouldn't want them to spend their whole lives in a padded room being only allowed to consume nutritional paste and essentially have no life at all.
There is that idea of laws shouldn't be made for individual cases. It's a bit like how many people believed things like rock music made people into murderers or suicidal only to now have lots of people claim it saved them.
There are people claiming that LLM systems helped them through harsh times.
I say claim, because I neither know all the details about those cases nor claimed suicides, but the idea of absolutes like that is a lot more bothering than what you quoted. And not being able to take (maybe understand?) nuanced stances.
As a thought experiment, let's say someone started claiming that car rides are a significant cause of suicides, and pointed to anecdotal cases where car rides were involved in a suicide. How would you disagree with them without either sounding callous about those cases, or saying something with the same meaning as "suicides are unfortunate, but"?
I don't know how much culpability LLMs have for causing someone self harm but I definitely think it's worth having a conversation about this. Some cases, like Adam Raine suffering from ChatGPT's unhinged sycophancy, are obvious. ChatGPT really screwed up there.
But some cases aren't so obvious, like the cases you mentioned of cartoons, shows, books, etc. Trying to censor any LLM output that might lead to self harm has dangerous implications for free speech and privacy. It might harm more people than it helps.
CA recently passed SB-1119 (Adam's Law) which I'm quite worried about. It forces all chatbot operators to default users into kid mode via § 21811(b), and they have to do age verification to get their adult status back. That could mean face scans and ID verification.
Then, SB-1119 also places limits on what chatbots can say to kids, and the most disturbing one to me is § 21812 (d)(5)(xiv) which prevents chatbots from "Encouraging or instructing a child user to circumvent parental controls or conceal usage."
That word "circumvent" is so triggering to me, given all the abuses of DMCA § 1201's anti-circumvention provision.
Like, if a child is trying to test something on an Android phone, and the chatbot tells them how to root the phone to help them out, now the child can modify the OS-provided age signal required by CA's Age Assurance Act (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.501) and fake that they're an adult. That might expose the LLM operator to huge liability and I bet most operators will self-censor or ban minors (as Anthropic did) rather than risk a lawsuit.
Stopped reading right there, nothing of value was lost.
If you want to talk about AI companies who are the equivalent of Phillip-Morris etc perhaps you ought to look at the ones who are playing lobbiest in DC, hmm?
No way you know what character.ai is well enough to have this strong of a reaction, but didn't expect them to lobby in DC the moment states started trying to legislate AI chatbots for their products driving children to suicide
I don't know if this is maybe a denial because of a personal connection to the company, but there are subs where kids as young as 12 openly talk about withdrawls and coach each other through relapses from C.ai and "the purple ghost app" (Polybuzz)
>I don't know if this is maybe a denial because of a personal connection to the company,
No, I'm someone who's lived through 30-odd years of 'think of the children bullshit' political manipulations to spot them a mile away.
I've lived through enough moral panics to know the stink of them. Your source is checks notes a link to a sketchy AI activist site[1] and an obscure subreddit (and those are _never_ astro-turfed, nor are they vulnerable to botting ;-) ;-)).
The Alliance works toward
Securing AI for America and All of Humanity.
We are at a critical time in history. The advanced AI revolution is here, and we are not ready. With artificial general intelligence (AGI) on the horizon, we must be prepared. The Alliance for Secure AI is working to educate the public about what needs to be done to prepare for this unprecedented technological revolution.
With effective safeguards in place, we can ensure that the United States leads the world in AI innovation, that our leaders put our national security first, and that the AI revolution empowers humanity. The risks of advanced AI are too serious and uncertain to ignore.
/quote
I don't buy your sources, but I won't lower myself to accuse you of being a shill -this is hacker news, after all -we have higher standards here.
Alright you're clearly linked to them (maybe as a customer upset by moderation children bought) or just having an episode.
There were multiple suicides linked to the app with multiple states trying to legislate their vertical... at that point this diversion about who's confirming they did the obvious thing of hiring lobbyists is pretty moot.
That is literally a subreddit of first hand accounts with this app having kids talk about relapse and withdrawl.
Not familiar with the company. Home page says nothing other than a tag line and a signup to continue. About page does add very little. Their blog provides a little bit of insight, but honestly, I have no clue what they sell or what the value prop is.
Maybe I'm the clueless one, at it seems others are quite familiar with their story.
Same for me, didn‘t know the company and the website says absolutely nothing about what they do. Wikipedia helped me; it‘s an AI chat bot service where you can interact with customizable characters.
Check their Reddit. Their userbase is rabid and has a casual relationship with reality. I checked a few random posts and there were people talking about how their life was over or how character.ai was the only thing that worked for therapy.
Honestly I’d be glad if this type of product disappeared, it’s just predatory on people primed for ai psychosis
All the drama in here just because it's a gooning and role play toy.
From what I can tell it was a popular tool with many users, one of the more popular ones among MANY. There are thousands of users using tools like this. Nothing inherently bad about that.
Did you ever try? The internet is full of spam, scam and and whatever else. You can easily waste a lot of time and money to find a play partner just to get disappointed.
Why not just pay $20 to a proper company and make up whatever you want to fap to and proceed with more productive stuff after that?
Do you actually think gooning is such a intense thing that people are going to personify AI more than what they do already everyday with Gemini and ChatGPT?
Yeah I find it really creepy how obsessed people like altman are at preventing users from having any sort of adult conversation. It's like living under shariah law.
Why does it matter if people want the chatbot to write sex stories? Who does that harm? It's not immoral or illegal. These same people are fine with going to the island, but ask a chatbot about sex and they'll hang you in the square.
You're not really helping answer the core question here: Why must subjective "weirdness" be censored? Who cares if it's "weird"? People are allowed to be weird, regardless of your personal feelings about it.
When we normalize corporations deciding in what ways we are allowed to be "weird", we just accept corporations forcing us into conformity with whatever they happen to consider "normal", and so far these companies don't have a great track record of drawing that line.
> You're having sex with a robot bro. People are going to find you weird.
Leading AIs refuse to write erotica. This is stuff that about half of US women like. If you consider the softcore porn in most romance novels, the percentage is even higher.
So if you think women are weird, yeah, I guess you have a point.
> These same people are fine with going to the island, but ask a chatbot about sex and they'll hang you in the square
That's the most understandable read of it, they're giant hypocrites. Sam is beholden to the government, and the U.S. posture is to be as involved in the sex life of its citizens as much as it can, feigning prudishness, while politicians cheat on their pregnant wives with prostitutes.
The fact that we are bringing back abstinence programs when the very people against abortion also disapprove of contraception just shows what a sexually stupid country we are.
It was my impression that some of these companies are getting acquired for the data they collected, and $20M seems on the low-end nowadays, especially given the traffic they had.
So, is it that Disney isn't getting the data, is the data poor, or is it just not a data thing at all?
The data is mostly teens and young adults pushing the bots into softcore smut as far as the censor classifier allowed them. Almost a liability rather than an asset.
Never liked CHaracter.AI. They ran a bug bounty program before they were acquired.
I found multiple critical bugs (ability to access other user accounts without even having to guess or know the username) and they patched them, told me they were 'informative' and didn't pay me anything.
The FAQ says the chats continue to be protected under our Privacy Policy. Great. They’re selling all or substantially all of the assets though and for a companion app the chats are the asset. So who’s buying and does the privacy policy go with them?
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 19.6 ms ] threadMeanwhile at $bigco I just got my request to buy a shitty $1k Dell laptop denied because I got one 2 years ago and I have to wait 1 more.
One day I figured nobody forces me to work for such company.
If you want an unsustainable joyride, then you too can work for a startup headed for chapter 11 (like 8 out of 10 startups).
Also, knowing people in general has never not been valuable. It's arguably the main thing holding most engineers back from success. Plenty of evidence backs this up: Type fewer keys, press more palms.
If nothing else, those human connections can be the difference in outcomes when you inevitably screw up. If you've invested in relationships, when you make a mistake, it's more likely someone will say "bluefirebrand means well, and I can see how their good intentions led to this outcome. Let's figure out how to fix this so it won't happen again to them or anyone else." If no one at work knows you except as the person who sits off to the side and never talks to their coworkers, the response may very well be "bluefirebrand who? Alright, let HR know we need to hire a replacement."
Again, it ought to be the case that none of that matters, and everyone is treated the same regardless of their personal network. But it is the case that this isn't how the world works, and it's not reasonable to wish it otherwise. I mean, are you as likely to help a stranger as a friend even if their needs are identical? Most people would say no.
Yes exactly and here you are telling me that's fine and I shouldn't think that's unjust
Or worse, that I deserve it somehow, for being someone socially awkward that struggles to connect with people?
Thanks.
There's a reason I don't like how the world Is and think it Ought to be different. Social weirdos like me matter too :/
I'd adjust this and say that they can carry you, but not as far as if you did both well.
Signing on to a hookers-and-blow startup is a choice a lot of these folks made, not their only route to money
But the main reason I’d generally work at startups anyway is because it’s more fun. When something needs to be done, you can’t contact the department that does the thing. You are that department; go figure it out!
And yes, that’s also a lot more pressure, but I wouldn’t trade it for a 9-5 desk job. (Other people absolutely would, and do. I never criticize their decision making. That’s what’s right for them. It’s just not what’s right for me.)
There are bad and good people everywhere. I’ve seen new fewer good people at small companies than large or non-tech ones.
This is the way tech has always been. Or as Carlin said "It's a big club... And you ain't in it."
Occasionally, you can ride their coattails (there will always be rising tides), but if you don't have the right connections and the right degrees from the right universities, you're not invited to the box seat TLA titles of these things...
The odds are much better than state lotteries, and the payout is higher than the stock market, but most of us still need to do our own financial planning instead of socializing the risks of the founder class as they privatize the gains. And yet, each day I get these ludicrous emails from a16z about which startups started by which all star founders wants to hire me for less than I make from passive revenue these days for bread crumbs of equity.
But the thing here is, who needs character.ai in an age of local models and cheap tokens from OpenAI and Anthropic (unless you're very naughty and not shaming, just noting)? High margin role play disrupted by cheap open weight models: how very Clayton Christensen.
Their startups get acquired, or they get acqui-hired because of the founders and core people, who in turn have some pedigree which send strong signals.
If you look at the pattern, it is roughly:
- Top ML/AI researchers from the past 10-15 years - Top ML/AI engineers from top labs or companies
Those above people were hired by FAANG companies or AI startups.
But most important of all, it isn't a overnight success. Many of these have been going at it for 10+ years now. Of course some are relatively young, as in having joined Anthropic or OpenAI more recently (past few years), and launching their own startup after 2022.
It's also about having the right moral flexibility. To be in this particular club, you have to hang out with some people that a bunch of us would really rather not be associated with...
All I can say is if you want in, you have to maximize your surface area for luck. There's a lot written about that concept but it's the basic underpinning of my success personally. I just rolled the dice way more times than most people.
— https://blog.character.ai/the-next-chapter-of-entertainment-...
But again, I support the ban for children.
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.
Laws aren't real till 2029, at least
But splitting big tech is unavoidable as otherwise they will sink the rest of the economy with them (and then it will be split anyway).
Please don't try to convince people to accept the current abuses of the system as inevitable or "both sides" when they clearly aren't.
Please stop only waking up under a Republican administration, or even worse just under the administration of a wrestling valet game show host.
> clearly aren't.
"Oh, please" and "it's just so obvious." If it's so clear, you should have less trouble explaining it than other things. And that doesn't mean explaining the bad things that your enemies do in power, but explaining how your friends weren't doing those things and actively ending them when they were in power.
Clinton did the massive deregulation that defined this century. Obama didn't prosecute anyone for 2008 financial crimes*, let Citigroup pick his cabinet, bailed out the banks, and flooded the stock market with free cash. Biden is literally the Delaware credit card prevent student loans from being discharged in bankruptcy guy, he had great people in Kanter, Khan and Chopra and undermined and ignored them consistently while breaking a railroad strike.
All absolute dirtbags who did what Republicans could have never gotten away with, because partisans who pretend to care fall asleep when Democrats are in power. A lot of consulting firms and nonprofits get flooded with state cash when Democrats are in power, and don't when Republicans are in power (and vice versa.) Patronage is more powerful than ethics when it comes to the middle class.
[*] Or for a worldwide torture network, or the people who admitted destroying evidence of the worldwide torture network. Or for the intentional lies that began two Middle East wars.
Yes, but Trump says silly things on social media.
Do we also need to retire ‘head hunting’, because it brings to mind cartoonishly outdated notions of savagery?
Reject modernity, embrace tradition.
Do you object if someone says, "I adopted a new strategy"? After all, children are adopted, and one could say that using this phrase trivializes a deeply important human relationship.
Do you object if someone says, "She's a fan of my work"? After all, a fan is a machine that blows air. It could be said that referring to a person as a fan reduces them to an appliance whose purpose is to serve someone else.
Do you object if someone says, "I have a date tonight"? After all, a date is a fruit. Someone could say that calling a romantic partner a "date" is to objectify them and reduce them to something consumed for pleasure.
No one is "taking a term" and "trying to apply" it to anything. The word has multiple meanings/uses, full stop.
What you are objecting to is one of its meanings (attracting employees from a competitor), because you don't like the negative connotation of another of its meanings (stealing game). And that's because you believe that the latter meaning's negative connotation will make the former also feel more negative. But I submit that that's just in your head, and the heads of a few others, and the vast majority of people are able to keep two definitions quite separate.
"Hi-quired," although not sonorous, is at least a new word for a specific thing, instead of a word for a closely related thing that would just confuse anyone who heard it. I might've just gone for "Hire-quired" because it's obvious what it means and it seems a little bit easier to say.
All this other stuff people are trying to make up falls under those two when a company buys another.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-...
Not clear that this is true financially. Of course, it sucks to be at a sinking ship, but in most of these the people left behind are compensated as both employees and shareholders.
Don't all shares / options go to zero in Chapter 11, or is that only true in Chapter 7 when the lenders take over?
In any case, I'm not sure Character.ai's assets will be worth much or that the employees will have any sort of liquidation preference.
The fact that the legal entity has no money doesn't mean they didn't get paid.
This is also partially why your common stock options can be valued significantly less than the price the company value would imply: because it’s not an even share in the business.
Assuming you're talking about the Trados Inc litigation, the situation was:
* Raised 52m
* Acquired for 52m
* 8m paid to exec team to stay in place
* Common stock got zero
The lawsuit determined that the board did have a fiduciary duty to the common stock, but that the common stock had no economic value, so they were not actually being harmed here, aka this is basically the best deal the company could have gotten, but it didn't clear the pref stack.
In the Groq/Character deals, they very obviously cleared the pref stack, so common stock deserves to get a piece of the licensing deal at the rate of the stock they held. It's annoying because its a dividend and doesn't benefit from QSBS, etc, but common stock is getting paid there.
You join a company, are granted ISOs/RSUs/etc, and they matter at some point when a liquidity event happens.
Now the liquidity events are "acquihireasitions", the execs and senior AI/ML eng get buyouts to go to a new company -- everyone else: regular eng, designers, PMs, marketers, recruiting, etc. everyone else is just left with nothing.
I wouldn't join an AI startup unless I was on the ML side, and I'm not: I'm just a "regular ass product engineer" so screw me I guess.
Everyone who had stock (including common stock) at character.ai was bought out at the $2.6bn price: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-hires-charact...
The buyout included guaranteed payouts for people who had unvested stock for 2 years post-acquisition.
These transactions are opaque and confusing, but employees are generally not being fucked over here.
How is hiring people "terrible practice"?
"if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's probably a duck" should apply to acquisitions. These types of acquisitions leave employees (+ other shareholders) holding the bag. It should be illegal.
Along with the rest of the top 5 states where almost everyone lives in the USA?
Have you ever even lived for a significant amount of time outside of California? Ever try New York, Texas, or Florida? Nobody is "shackled to their workstation" there either. California leads in unaffordable living and wealth inequality, and it's not even because those on top in California are living any better than even the upper middle class elsewhere.
The economy is much more than tech and most of those businesses are not in California and don't want to be.
Noncompete "agreements" are evil and run counter to every redeeming quality that a free market economy has. If your state allows them, they are in favor of indentured servitude, plain and simple. In contrast, California stands as a beacon for those who refuse such chains. We don't just ban noncompetes in California, we actively liberate those who move here from their out-of-state noncompetes.
And contrary to what you'll read on here, California is not just tech. We've got a massive agriculture industry (more than 50% of the country's produce), several of the best universities in the world, the entire entertainment industry (to such a degree that we're killing everyone's accents), one of the top financial sectors, and the largest manufacturing industry in the country. Hell, our restaurants are better than anywhere else in the country: I can walk down the street walk past multiple restaurants that would be the best in the entire state in most of the rest of the country, to a point that I take it for granted until I walk into a random restaurant in the heartland somewhere and expect it to be good.
We treat our companies well and our residents better. Hell, we even treat our non-residents better than any other state, given that our taxes subsidize the existence of the parasitic 41.
When the worst thing about your state is a housing shortage due to everyone wanting to be there, that's glowing praise.
Yes, by offering them things like equity in the company. This practice throws all that out the window though, in essence unilaterally renegotiating the terms of employment. When the leadership team can be acquired independently of the company then these employees can be left with nothing. Sometimes the corp doing the acquisition will throw a bone to the dregs left, but that does not appear to be legally required. It's exploitative and unjust.
This is kinda amusing.
An antitrust case over an AI girlfriend... I didn't even know there was a monopoly on that.
very smart. very good terminology invented by someone who, i'm sure, has lots of blog followers.
It's a real disgrace that companies like Google and Disney acquired people from them - it displays those companies' true values and motives: profit at any fckin human prize.
Disney is guilty of a lot of crap—everything else that you mentioned and much more—but that specific instance wasn’t their fault and they acted to correct it once they knew.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-rescuers-topless/
Again, I’m not here to defend Disney, they definitely are rotten, but we can point that out by listing all the things they definitely did badly and on purpose rather than leaning on dubious situations which weaken the argument.
LLMs are “yes men," and they will on average agree with you with enough arguing. Go chat with one about a fight you had or even make one up and watch as it soothes and supports you. In fact, I put my finished argument into an LLM and opened two different chats and spoke to it in both of our perspectives, and depending on who was prompting it, it claimed the prompter was “right”.
Now, with that in mind, consider the situation: a youth already feels depressed; they talk to the chatbot and, after enough talking, the chatbot is agreeing with them because that is the “probable” mix of tokens. This is platform-agnostic, because it is a fundamental aspect of LLMs. So any value judgment you apply to C.AI specifically must be forwarded to every company, because I have seen, heard, and even made custom roleplay cards with every vendor.
Suicides are unfortunate, but even if the LLMs had a role to play, there’s like what, one confirmed case for C.AI’s entire user base? Even if we assume that was only the “known” cases and assume that there are actually closer to 3000 out of their +30 million user base, then that’s basically the chance of being struck by lightning and is below the standard rate of suicide per the CDC.
There simply is not strong evidence that LLMs are likely to increase suicides, and while they can be a vector for those with underlying issues, so can anything else. People have committed suicide over cartoons, radio shows, books, TikTok trends, and losing game consoles, and certainly not to mention social media.
In short, the advent of LLM chatbots is not strongly correlated to an increased suicide risk, and instead it was an unfortunate situation sensationalized for the eyes of the public by the media. If you wish to push your outrage at anyone, do it at the people who profited off of the suicide and not the company that was picked apart in the process.
If you ever start sentences this way,
Stop, Delete your comment, and Step away from your computer.
Talking about suicide can cause people to commit suicide, should it be outlawed?
And there were books banned for similar ideas and society at large decided that in most cases it's overreacting and does more harm than good.
Yes, I'd do everything for children to not die, but I wouldn't want them to spend their whole lives in a padded room being only allowed to consume nutritional paste and essentially have no life at all.
There is that idea of laws shouldn't be made for individual cases. It's a bit like how many people believed things like rock music made people into murderers or suicidal only to now have lots of people claim it saved them.
There are people claiming that LLM systems helped them through harsh times.
I say claim, because I neither know all the details about those cases nor claimed suicides, but the idea of absolutes like that is a lot more bothering than what you quoted. And not being able to take (maybe understand?) nuanced stances.
But some cases aren't so obvious, like the cases you mentioned of cartoons, shows, books, etc. Trying to censor any LLM output that might lead to self harm has dangerous implications for free speech and privacy. It might harm more people than it helps.
CA recently passed SB-1119 (Adam's Law) which I'm quite worried about. It forces all chatbot operators to default users into kid mode via § 21811(b), and they have to do age verification to get their adult status back. That could mean face scans and ID verification.
Then, SB-1119 also places limits on what chatbots can say to kids, and the most disturbing one to me is § 21812 (d)(5)(xiv) which prevents chatbots from "Encouraging or instructing a child user to circumvent parental controls or conceal usage."
That word "circumvent" is so triggering to me, given all the abuses of DMCA § 1201's anti-circumvention provision.
Like, if a child is trying to test something on an Android phone, and the chatbot tells them how to root the phone to help them out, now the child can modify the OS-provided age signal required by CA's Age Assurance Act (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.501) and fake that they're an adult. That might expose the LLM operator to huge liability and I bet most operators will self-censor or ban minors (as Anthropic did) rather than risk a lawsuit.
Stopped reading right there, nothing of value was lost.
If you want to talk about AI companies who are the equivalent of Phillip-Morris etc perhaps you ought to look at the ones who are playing lobbiest in DC, hmm?
https://secureainow.org/clipping/ai-lobbying-shifts-congress...
I don't know if this is maybe a denial because of a personal connection to the company, but there are subs where kids as young as 12 openly talk about withdrawls and coach each other through relapses from C.ai and "the purple ghost app" (Polybuzz)
https://www.reddit.com/r/character_ai_recovery/
https://www.reddit.com/r/character_ai_recovery/comments/1wzz...
No, I'm someone who's lived through 30-odd years of 'think of the children bullshit' political manipulations to spot them a mile away.
I've lived through enough moral panics to know the stink of them. Your source is checks notes a link to a sketchy AI activist site[1] and an obscure subreddit (and those are _never_ astro-turfed, nor are they vulnerable to botting ;-) ;-)).
I'm sure the website you cited ( https://secureainow.org/clipping/ai-lobbying-shifts-congress... ) *totally* has nothing to do with anthropic etc trying to build a legislative moat by using a moral panic. No sir, not a thing![2]
[1]https://secureainow.org/clipping/ai-lobbying-shifts-congress... [2]quote from their front page (which tips their hand):
The Alliance works toward Securing AI for America and All of Humanity.
We are at a critical time in history. The advanced AI revolution is here, and we are not ready. With artificial general intelligence (AGI) on the horizon, we must be prepared. The Alliance for Secure AI is working to educate the public about what needs to be done to prepare for this unprecedented technological revolution.
With effective safeguards in place, we can ensure that the United States leads the world in AI innovation, that our leaders put our national security first, and that the AI revolution empowers humanity. The risks of advanced AI are too serious and uncertain to ignore. /quote
I don't buy your sources, but I won't lower myself to accuse you of being a shill -this is hacker news, after all -we have higher standards here.
There were multiple suicides linked to the app with multiple states trying to legislate their vertical... at that point this diversion about who's confirming they did the obvious thing of hiring lobbyists is pretty moot.
That is literally a subreddit of first hand accounts with this app having kids talk about relapse and withdrawl.
And you, sir, are overly-fond of your ad hominem attacks and baseless assumptions.
Good day.
[1] https://character.ai/careers
> Your information continues to be protected under our Privacy Policy, and our data privacy and security practices are unchanged.
Opens Privacy Policy
> 2. How We Use the Information We Collect
> …wall of text covering every use under the sun…
> 3. When We Disclose the Information We Collect
> …wall of text covering effectively anyone and any time…
Translation: yeah you agreed that your data can be sold, and it will be sold.
Maybe I'm the clueless one, at it seems others are quite familiar with their story.
[0] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2025/10/2...
Honestly I’d be glad if this type of product disappeared, it’s just predatory on people primed for ai psychosis
From what I can tell it was a popular tool with many users, one of the more popular ones among MANY. There are thousands of users using tools like this. Nothing inherently bad about that.
Nothing wrong with some AI gooning IMO
Why not just pay $20 to a proper company and make up whatever you want to fap to and proceed with more productive stuff after that?
Why does it matter if people want the chatbot to write sex stories? Who does that harm? It's not immoral or illegal. These same people are fine with going to the island, but ask a chatbot about sex and they'll hang you in the square.
When we normalize corporations deciding in what ways we are allowed to be "weird", we just accept corporations forcing us into conformity with whatever they happen to consider "normal", and so far these companies don't have a great track record of drawing that line.
Leading AIs refuse to write erotica. This is stuff that about half of US women like. If you consider the softcore porn in most romance novels, the percentage is even higher.
So if you think women are weird, yeah, I guess you have a point.
That's the most understandable read of it, they're giant hypocrites. Sam is beholden to the government, and the U.S. posture is to be as involved in the sex life of its citizens as much as it can, feigning prudishness, while politicians cheat on their pregnant wives with prostitutes.
The fact that we are bringing back abstinence programs when the very people against abortion also disapprove of contraception just shows what a sexually stupid country we are.
50069942 Character.ai Files for Bankruptcy https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1009802/...
50071087 Disney Bids on Character.ai Assets as Chatbot Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/disney-bids-on-character-a...
So, is it that Disney isn't getting the data, is the data poor, or is it just not a data thing at all?
I found multiple critical bugs (ability to access other user accounts without even having to guess or know the username) and they patched them, told me they were 'informative' and didn't pay me anything.