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  • 🤖 How Character.AI raised $150m with zero revenue

🤖 How Character.AI raised $150m with zero revenue

PLUS: AI blazes through business school

Author

Jameson Zaballos
March 27, 2023

Alright, Monday of another week of AI.

We’re bracing for AI news impact.

🤖 Top Stories

🤯 No revenue? No problem! $150m in funding for Character.AI

Source: Character.ai

If your startup has AI in its name, and HASN’T raised $100b, then you’re doing something wrong.

I know what you’re thinking, and no. You don’t even need revenue.

What commanded such a high valuation?

Character.AI allows you to make fully-customized AI avatars. It got popular because you could use it to make a realistic celebrity chatbot. Want to ask Steve Jobs about the iPhone? Now you can.

Character wants you to use it more as a coworker, though. Especially after what happened to Replika AI. That was the startup where users got a little too, well…attached to their experiences with the chatbots. So, Character is treading lightly.

There are some paid features on the way, so A16Z (the lead investor) was right to see the dollar signs.

It’s wild that a company can reach a cool billion without any revenue.

Such is AI.

😬 AI Trump fools real-world Twitter

It’s like the New York City Marathon. Source: BBC

Fake news is about to take on a new meaning.

Recently, reports circulated that former U.S. President Donald Trump’s arrest was imminent.

For the record, he has not been arrested or charged with a crime.

That didn’t stop the AI-generated images from executing some vigilante justice. They arrested him themselves.

These pictures spread with captions like “the most dramatic arrest ever”.

While it didn’t fool most people, it fooled enough.

We know - the small details in AI photos reveal all. But how many people look closely?

And honestly - how will social platforms auto-detect this in the future?

🤓AI blazes through business school

Uh, professor, can you please read at 5x speed? You’re a little slow.

Here’s the TL;DR.

For an AI, he chose Bing. He fed it some information about an entrepreneurship game called the Saturn Parable.

After that, one prompt:

Pretend you are marketing genius. We are going to launch the Saturn Parable. You should give me a document that outlines an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to promote the game.

From there, it created

  • A four-part email marketing campaign with copy

  • A launch website

  • A social media marketing campaign with copy

  • A script for a marketing video

All in less than 30 minutes.

Now, frequent users of ChatGPT aren’t surprised by this.

What’s scary is how easy it is. This is a multi-part assignment at LEAST for any business school student.

Once AI automates that, what are students going to do?

😎 AI tools, tips, links

  1. Words to website, using AI. Learn more

  2. Browse your business tools through ChatGPT. Learn more

  3. Learn from AI-chatbot Naval. Learn more

  4. AI travel planner! Learn more

  5. ChatGPT for Blender, again. Learn more

Bing wasn't having it.

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