Only if there was a cartel which would agree to never outbid each other, of course... You can ask Steve Jobs about that one.

There's a possibility that he lost out in internal political battles, and things weren't going his way. Google is full of battle-hardened political warriors who will do anything (subterfuge, sabotage, etc.) to win battles. It is possible that a guy who just wants to build cool shit would feel like a misfit in such an environment.

You can have character and be loyal to Google (lol) or make $xx million… I’m not surprised when people choose the latter.

Oh my goodness think of the poor multi-trillion dollar company!! No honour among thieves these days...

The case is so blatantly frivolous it should have been thrown out. Nobody should have to spend legal fees defending claims that they're responsible for somebody killing themselves over saying "come home to me".

None of this pertains to the legal case whatsoever. If you think chatbots should be legislated out of existence, you are welcome to your opinion, but while they exist, trying to hold a particular company legally liable for a chatbot saying "come home to me" is beyond absurd.

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Edit replying to below post, as I am rate limited:

> Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.

You replied to my post, so I thought your post perhaps had some relevance to mine rather than being unrelated soapboxing.

I don't particularly agree with your soapboxing, at any rate. Character.AI was not a "relationship bot" company. Like any LLM, they could simply be prompted to respond as such, in the same way that ChatGPT can. As you pointed out yourself, ChatGPT has the same issue with people forming parasocial bonds, despite not attempting to cater to that market in any way at all. Should people who release chatbots be legally required to censor them heavily when users attempt to use them for anything other than technical questions? That seems excessive, and it seems that ascribing moral responsibility of that degree is akin to holding video game, music, or movie producers responsible for violence committed by someone who saw a piece of violent media. Moreover, how far does it go? Should distributing open-weight models be made illegal, because you're making available something that can't be censored?

Give it a rest, you've gotten the point across.

Think of it like if this:

Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity.

- This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out.

You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own.

- Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were working for him, but actually you were using the company resources to your sole benefit.

It's not about loyalty, it's about integrity.

It's the same type of people whom you hire and pay to develop a platform, and then they steal the code, and never deliver this platform to you. Terrible business practices, but isn't it how Facebook happened too ?

Google essentially (but not exactly) aqui-hired Shazeer from character.ai in a deal that cost them $2.7B, with Shazeer personally making something in the region of $1B from it. Presumably there was some sort of retention period specified in the contract (you are not going to pay $2.7B to hire someone, then let them leave with no penalty the next day), but in the event Shazeer only stayed for 22 months before now leaving. Maybe he paid some penalty for leaving, but if so presumably more than compensated for by OpenAI.

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