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.

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.

Depends. Is it solar energy that started production to power these models? Great! If not, then you’re still consuming power and the difference will have to be made somewhere, likely by burning more fossil fuels.