Character.AI, the GenAI site that convinced some children to kill themselves, has gone bankrupt after parents sued them.
we found hordes of chatbots explicitly dedicated to themes of pedophilia, suicide, self-harm, and eating disorder coaching, as well as a thriving community of users creating chatbots designed to simulate school shootings, romanticize real mass shooters, and even impersonate the real child victims of mass shootings.
OpenAI and Anthropic only have the revenue that they do because of all these ‘startups’ burning 10x in tokens what they actually bring in, and that revenue still sucks anyway. Each one that fails is another little trickle of water leaking through the dam; bubbles burst slowly, then all at once.
They are using local models for the most part, actually.