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)

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thor-rodrigues 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have the impression that if MAU by itself was sufficient, the company wouldn’t have had to file for bankruptcy.

Obviously the company failed to convert its MAU into paying users, despite the fact the token costs greatly declined over the last years.

	▲	embedding-shape 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why don't they just not count token costs at all (or any other cost-per-user) and only look at profits, like what Anthropic is doing to figure out if they're profitable?

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PxldLtd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I disagree that it's reductive. If each user costs more in API tokens then your company isn't valuable. That's what everyone's been screaming from the rooftops about there being a bubble. We certainly use tons of AI at the company I work for, if we were paying full API prices then I would bet we'd be barely using it.

	▲	phillipcarter an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There's always enterprise wheeling and dealing to keep something discounted, but enterprises are absolutely paying API prices for tokens. For AI coding a least, the issue is more about attributing tokens to a real backlog (no leeching tokens for side projects) and keeping things from running away, both of which all the major AI coding platforms offer solutions for.

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skeeter2020 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

webvan and pets.com have entered the chat.

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irl_zebra 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As we saw after the hero Zelenskyy took down Yandex data centers, user count seems to be vaporware in many cases.

	▲	gaiagraphia an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm seeing this repeated a lot, but I'm rarely seeing the evidence to back it up. Presumably you're not speaking about Yandex's search engine crawlers here, right? In an internet full of metrics and graphs, it's odd that nobody's bringing anything to the table and is just repeating the meme. A bit bottish in itself, tbh. If it turned out "usercount was vapourware" due to 3 Russian data centres getting btfo, I think there'd have been a global financial crisis underway as we speak.

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cicko an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

A drug dealer at the corner also has lots of active monthly users.