Alan Xing

I've been thinking about AI products recently, and while the major labs (OpenAI, GDM, Anthropic) are competing on productivity assistants, character is clearly going in a different direction. Thinking from first principles, human beings have a few fundamental desires: not being sick, staying out of jail, not being hungry, not being lonely, etc. Very lucrative industries have developed around these desires---medicine, law, restaurants, p*rn, etc. But there is currently no big industry around emotional connection. And it seems likely that society is moving towards such an industry being compelling, given increased rates of loneliness, people getting married later, etc. Character seems to be breaking through into this, with reported average session times of 2+ hours, and reaching the top of the app store, on par with netflix. I'm really curious about two things: 1. Who are the users of character.ai? I don't personally know anyone who uses it (but obviously the people I know personally is a very biased slice of the world). 2. What are the use cases of character.ai? An obvious first guess is erotic content, but I'm not sure that's true; I tried to get it to generate erotic content but it gave similar refusals to the other chatbots. I kinda get the anime / fanfic use cases, but I also feel like that doesn't explain all of it. Character is obviously getting something right---they have one of the strongest engineering teams around and massive product usage. It doesn't feel impossible that in a few decades, emotional connection will be one of the top 100 industries in the world. Perhaps the rest of us are missing something. Would love to hear people's takes.