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Character.AI Gave Up on AGI. Now It’s Selling Stories
Startup Character.AI once promised superintelligence. Its new CEO says it's now an entertainment company with 20 million users.
Anand, who previously worked as the VP of business products at Meta, was tasked with picking up the pieces—which he did in part by leaving behind the founding mission of delivering personalized superintelligence to focus on AI entertainment. These updates, he says, mark a shift from Character.AI being seen as just a chatbot company to something more ambitious: an entertainment engine where users can consume and create stories, remix content, and experiment with new formats like audiobooks. When I bring this up to Anand, he explains that when users create Characters modeled after public figures like Musk or Bezos, the system is designed to clearly signal that these are parodies, not attempts at deepfakes or impersonation.
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