Data engineering completely automated by a startups technology. This dataset sells for hundreds of thousands a year and can be fully cleansed and prepared from raw data purely with AI.
OAI spends gobs of money on Mercor and Windsurf telemetry gets them similar data. My guess is they saw their Mercor spend hitting close to 1B a year in the next 5 years if they did nothing to curb it
This is another inflection style "acquisition." Highly unethical of the founders and screws over all your employees and investors who are left holding the bag.
For those asking, c.ai has very high cost and looks like a typical consumer company that burns money for use, so they were decent on revenue but not near profitability.
> Character’s leaders told staff on Friday that investors would be bought out at a valuation of about $88 per share. That’s about 2.5 times the value of shares in Character’s 2023 Series A, which valued the company at $1 billion, they said.
> investors would be bought out at a valuation of about $88 per share. That’s about 2.5 times the value of shares in Character’s 2023 Series A, which valued the company at $1 billion
Those investors almost certainly have a liquidation preference. How much did employee shareholders get? I'd guess zero.
"I am confident that the funds from the non-exclusive Google licensing agreement, together with the incredible Character.AI team, positions Character.AI for continued success in the future,” Shazeer said in a statement given to TechCrunch."
That's a pretty hilarious statement from a Founder/CEO, given the circumstances.
>liquidation preference. How much did employee shareholders get? I'd guess zero.
But they aren't filing for chapter 11? I assume all shareholders will be bought out, including the employees, and this will be paid for by Google who will license their models, presumably as a scheme to pay off of the investors as I doubt they actually need those models at all.
To do better by the employees, the CEO really should have fought harder to have the whole company get acqui-hired, even if Google would have shut down the service. Maybe there were some other considerations that I’m not seeing (ie. There are good reasons the company should be kept going, and there’s a good path to success even without Noam. The article doesn’t specify how many employees are going over, so it’s hard to tell.) Landing the employees a relatively cushy Google SWE gig after helping build your company is the least you could do for them.
I'm also wondering how much money they spend on legal fees, given that they are copying then likenesses of many celebrities without their permission (that's the only way I've heard abot them before).
Python is written in C, with raw pointers everywhere, manual reference counting, etc. Python C extensions are certainly low-level too. Knowing these details is important to write good code in some domains, and if you need to get as much performance out of Python as you can.
There's no formal hierarchy so there's nothing technical about it. Field's medal is certainly prestigious but it's not widely applicable, it has a bunch of restrictions that don't have anything to do with math itself, including an age limit. For example no one who has ever been awarded an Abel Prize would qualify for a Field's medal strictly due to age.
True, it is considered one of the two top honors in Math since last decade. Previously it was the only distinguished prize.
There was a growing need for another award which bridged few gaps. The 40 year cutoff age, awarded every 4 years to living mathematical prodigies failed to honor several prominent mathematical breakthroughs which came after decades of painstaking research.
As the field has progressed, monumental breakthroughs are harder to come by early into career. Many of the ingenuity comes from cross-study of disciplines for e.g. Riemannian hypothesis being approached by Algebraic geometry and Topology rather than number theory. These require years of mastery - not just prodigy. Also the prize money offered by Abel Foundation is a good incentive for research into pure math
As an alum, if the students don't love it, they can withdraw. Someone needs to foot the bill for research and education and CMU does not have a large endowment fund
Arguably one of the earliest consumer use cases that found footing was AI girlfriend/boyfriend. Large amounts of revenue spread across many small players are generated here but it's glossed over due to the category.
Given that how widespread romance scam schemes already are (the "market" is at least $0.5 billion/year), I would expect any reasonably functioning AI girlfriend/boyfriend model to be massively (ab)used also against unwilling/unwitting "partners".
I think one related area we'll start seeing more of in the future is "resurrected" companions. You have a terminally ill family member, so you train a model on a bunch of video recordings of them, then you can talk to "them" after they've shuffled off this mortal coil.
I think this is why we're seeing that the type of founders YC usually funds in these industries aren't going through YC and choosing alternative methods of getting started.
