alt Hacker NewsA lot of money moved through different hands, yet it doesn’t seems that nothing of value was created.
I wonder how any of this makes sense.
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This seems reductive. Character.ai has > 20 million monthly active users, and a lot of company valuation happens on the basis of user count (which is legitimate, that's not vaporware)
It seems like a lot of people enjoyed using the product. Isn't that value?
the rich in society (corps, individuals) are so absurdly rich that they can keep throwing money till something sticks with almost 0 risk. If you believe AI is something civilizationally transformational which it is resonable to believe, then why not throw some money at it.
But lot of numbers went up. And that mean lot of other numbers went up. Which means "wealth" for many went up. And they got bonuses paid.
A valuable company wasn't created in the end, but all kinds of value spewed out of this endeavor. The co-founders almost certainly walked away filthy rich. A few hundred people got 6-figure paychecks. A few early investors probably made a profit selling to greater fools.
It is rumored that their last round valued them at $6B.
The US just has a lot of venture capital money running around. It's common for biotech companies to raise about as much as Character.ai (although typically at lower valuations) and then never end up launching a successful product. From a societal perspective, it's valuable to be able to search the space of long shots; from a funder's perspective, the rewards of a good investment are high enough to pay for a lot of bad ones.
welcome to the world of VC startups
Get with the program, numbers go up = ai valuable. Don't look any closer, details are the AI's problem now.
Have you peeked at how the (very complicated) financial markets work?
Lot's of people staring at computers moving money and ious around complicated networks within complicated rules making money making money making money.
Really progressing humanity forward :/