cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/tech@piefed.world/p/2026105/character-ai-has-initiated-voluntary-chapter-11-bankruptcy
Guessing re-creating a whole ass person with a personality that considers everything you’ve told it is actually quite a bit more expensive than people want to pay for.
Anyway, it’s good news if these freaks start running their bots locally instead.
Basically, yes.
This comes back to the basic problem with LLMs as a business proposition; any digital service can either be cheap and frivolous, or expensive and necessary. You can even, if you do things right, be cheap and necessary. But you cannot ever be expensive and frivolous.
LLMs were supposed to be expensive and necessary, but it turns out they’re just so unreliable that they simply cannot perform an essential role. They must always be disposable; fun, or useful, but never essential.
Which leaves only cheap and frivolous as an option. And they’re just not cheap, nor does it seem likely that they ever will be.
So you get Character.ai filling chapter 11, because people simply will not ever pay what it actually costs to run these models just so that they can have a computer program pretend to be Lois Griffin for them.
With the added wrinkle that there are expensive things that may be necessary-ish, but when you exclusively use it for those things, the price jumps up to insanity.
Now that people are shunting easier requests to local models and sending the harder problems out, the hyper scalers have less income, so they have to charge more.
Because eventually the only real limitation will be hardware, that kind of AI will be a rarely-used commodity priced only slightly above what it would cost you to recreate it inside your business.
Not to mention the privacy concerns you’d have sending your expensive and necessary compute to the cloud.
And I’m sure they’ll sell their users’ private conversations to the next AI scum.
The environmental impact of AI would be a tenth of what it is now if people just ran whatever models they want on their own local machines. We’re mortgaging the next fifty years worth of compute power and meanwhile mfs who talk to virtual girlfriends on their $2,000 gaming PC have trillions of FLOPS of compute power sitting right next to them.
Why is that? The electricity burned is about the same, no? Of course, the impact is more distributed.
I think the difference would be that local machines aren’t subsidized, so you’d see people get a lot more skittish after that first electric bill. Data centers are like railroad tracks from the railroad boom (if they’d made the rails out of licorice twizzlers.)
Delicious. Finally some good fucking news
All my AI waifus gone
AIncels would cry that they killed their waifus and be driven to ride a sewer slide 🥀
