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.
If any of this shit made sense and worked like it was supposed to we wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. Seemingly the world leaders and everyone in the inner circles has completely abandoned any long term hope for their positions in the current system and are preparing for the next system. It really is true that the Earth has too many people and I think the long term planners are letting climate change happen without preparing the masses so fewer, stronger people survive. There is people planning this shit it’s not just arbitrarily short-term profits for the sake of it.
Onward, the Butlerian Jihad!
Paywall bypass of 404 Media article that this article referenced
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.
I mean sure if your older machine’s newer GPU has 200 GB of VRAM to run a decent quant… Fucking hell just Q4 is around 100 gigs and then you’d want a decent amount of KV cache too.
I encourage you to give Qwen 3.8 flash next a try. It’s amazing what a typical gaming machine can do with it.
Yeah but who’s making the models?
Mostly Chinese companies that aren’t necessarily required to generate infinitely compounding profits just to continue existing.
Edit: Also third parties such as volunteers who fine tune models for specific purposes. Just like with all software - everyone can learn and contribute when it’s open source.
Many groups are making models now. I see a future where we have open source data sources, models, and weights. Niche groups can extend models to be trained on whatever they want.
It will be interesting to see, but stories have come out for a while about some thing will pop the bubble, and a big recession has been right around the corner for at least a decade. What stage is this bubble in the progression to the .com pop, months, a year? Or is this different, with more profitable companies investing in infrastructure, rather than speculative startups without clear revenue plans? That was part of the take MMM made and I want to be hopeful. It reminded me about my circle of control, reduce attachment to outcomes beyond it, but do what I want within my circle. mrmoneymustache.com/2026/09/25/will-the-ai-bubble-destroy-our-retirement/
This is poised to be the biggest financial crash in history. These assholes are fighting every day to push the crash further away so they can divest themselves quietly or make ot to an IPO, and in doing so are making the upcoming disaster much worse.
And so much investment has been dumped into this scheme I don’t know how our economic system.will survive. Unchecked capitalism needs to go away, but having it collapse all at once is gonna be really, really bad.
maybe having really REALLY bad collapse is the only way people start caring enough to consider how to prevent it from happening again, or at least punish those who caused it. It seems majority will just have to suffer before anything happens since prevention isnt fashionable enough. Though i wonder if even that will shake people up enough.
“We lose money on every sale, but we make up for it in volume!”
I can’t imagine how much money Google is losing right now. They do 8.5 to 13.7 billion searches a day (+1 because I just googled that). By forcing LLM first, they’ve got to be burning cash.
This is silly, we can just print more money to cover the losses, ez pz !!!
Character.AI discovered the one conversation its bots couldn’t keep going: the one with its accountants. $56 million in compute costs in eight months, and the monetization strategy was apparently: hope the next investor is even lonelier than our users. Silicon Valley keeps confusing engagement with a business model.
If LLMs can’t be made more power efficient, then the technology isn’t ready yet for general use. There may have to be fundamental engineering breakthroughs before what these systems do can be more than a very expensive and inefficient worldwide proof of concept.
Of course, the military and the surveillance industry will still want to keep it, even if no one else can afford it, and we’ll be the ones paying for it.
There may have to be fundamental engineering breakthroughs before what these systems do can be more than a very expensive and inefficient worldwide proof of concept.
Controversial thought after reading this sentence: It’s cryptocoins all over again.
someone else replied with what i said
If LLMs can’t be made more power efficient, then the technology isn’t ready yet for general use.
Hm, I don’t see the harm in powering local models with solar.
Well that is an alternative. But I bet each query to a local 27b model takes less energy anyway than the same query to Claude Opus or Fable in some data centre. So it is also a case of improving energy efficiency by running smaller models.
But without widespread usage there won’t be any breakthroughs… Anti-LLM folk could redirect their attention to the core problem (energy source, wind and solar shouldn’t raise any concerns) but they prefer to attack the LLMs themselves. Early implementations of every technology were crazy energy ineffective at the moment when becoming practically useful.
Oh no, we won’t get breakthroughs in slop.
Whatever will we do?
No one should be arguing if LLMs are useful or worth investing into, they are and it can be a really useful tool, but the rich (seemingly spinless) lizards have managed to skyrocket the price of RAM, pushed global warming to new extrimes and jacked up electricity prices. Oh and while making an AI bubble so big and fradgile, that when (not if) popped will send us back to the great depression! All in the percute of “the next big thing”.
to;dr LLMs are a cool tech but in the percute of it have managed to fuck up a whole bunch
LLMs in the context of capitalism will always be used against the working class.
pursuit*
Let’s hope the rest follows.
Didn’t all of their devs get poached by Google after being bought out?
