Just 5 years in, interactive chatbot platform Character.AI files for bankruptcy
Twenty million dollars. That's less than some people spend on a single season of a streaming show, and it's what a company that was once chasing a billion-dollar valuation just sold for to Disney. I keep thinking about all those hours people poured into conversations with their favorite AI characters, and how those relationships are now, in a very real sense, Disney's property. There's something almost poetic about a company built on letting people talk to fictional beings being absorbed by the ultimate factory of fictional beings.
I'd want to know what Disney actually plans to do with the tech. Are they after the conversational engine, or the data on how millions of people form attachments to chatbots? That second one feels like the real treasure, and it's a little unsettling. The whole saga reads like a cautionary tale about how quickly the AI hype cycle can spin from "revolutionary" to "bankrupt," but I also can't shake the feeling that the underlying idea won't die here. It'll just get rebranded, repackaged, and sold back to us with mouse ears on it.