Other AI Companies Should Be Very Afraid of What Just Happened to Character.AI, According to Its Own Bankruptcy Documents: Be afraid.

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.

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.

Anti-LLM folk don’t just have an issue with energy consumption. There’s also the issue of intellectual theft, studies that correlate worsened education with LLM usage, and the tech leadership silencing those issues by corrupting politicians. But I’m sure if they get past that they’ll understand how great LLMs are.