alt Hacker NewsFor all intents and purposes Character.ai was acquired in August 2024, and this is just the mess leftover from their run around antitrust regulation.
The company filing for chapter 11 today is shell that was left after Google "hi-quired" (the opposite of acqui-hired) the founding team. The shareholders got paid ($2.7B from Google), the founding team moved on, and what's left is the corporate structure and whoever Google did not want.
It sucks for the people left over (but then again, it also sucks to be part of the team that's laid off in a merger). It's also a terrible practice that I hope the Justice department and the CFTC will put an end to soon.
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Isn't the opposite of acqui-hired just... not acquired nor hired?
Any such ban would be in direct conflict with California law (where I assume Character.ai, as a company founded by Xooglers living in Palo Alto is based), under the same logic that forbids non-competes. California has created one of the most prosperous countries in the world under a framework where you actually have to entice your employees not to leave, rather than shackling them to their workstations, and I would be extremely opposed to any attempt to change that.
was it a run around of anti-trust or character's liabilities? It will be interesting if there are creditor lawsuits / trustee clawbacks in the future around these deals.
> antitrust regulation
This is kinda amusing.
An antitrust case over an AI girlfriend... I didn't even know there was a monopoly on that.
American DOJ and CFTC won't do anything about these kinds of situations.
... and despite Google spending $2.7B for the "hi-quire", the superstars of the team left Google within a few months, making it all pointless.
> It's also a terrible practice that I hope the Justice department and the CFTC will put an end to soon.
How is hiring people "terrible practice"?
>It's also a terrible practice that I hope the Justice department and the CFTC will put an end to soon.
Laws aren't real till 2029, at least
> It sucks for the people left over
Not clear that this is true financially. Of course, it sucks to be at a sinking ship, but in most of these the people left behind are compensated as both employees and shareholders.