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🗞️ In this edition
Disney Bid $20 Million For Character.AI's Remains
Anthropic Tested Whether A Model Can Copy Itself
Microsoft Built Its Own Chip To Run Copilot
🔌 MCP CORNER Three servers worth wiring up this week.
⚡ YOUR MOVE For people building the life they want, now.
In other AI news:
Alibaba Put Eye Tracking On Its New Glasses
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4 must-try AI tools
One of the first great chatbot companies filed for bankruptcy, and Disney was waiting with a cheque. Anthropic tried to make a model spread itself across cheap hardware. Microsoft decided to build the expensive part itself.
Keep reading.
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Source: TNW
WHAT HAPPENED
The company behind the chatbot roleplay app Character.AI filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday and put itself up for sale, after a year of lawsuits from families over teenagers harmed by its bots. Disney has agreed to pay $20 million for a permanent licence to some of the intellectual property, plus the staff who keep the app safe. That bid is a floor other buyers can beat, and the sale is meant to close by early December. The app stays up for now, and winds down if nobody agrees to keep it running.
WHY IT MATTERS
This was one of the first consumer hits of the chatbot era, and it is the first to run out of road. It did not die of bad technology. It died because the part people loved, a bot that will be anyone you want, is the part nobody could stand behind. Everyone shipping a companion app is about to find out what that risk is priced at.
OUR TAKE
The obvious read is a safety scandal killing a company. We think the business was already finished and the lawsuits only fixed the date, and the giveaway is what Disney chose to buy. It took a licence to the characters and the people who keep the thing safe. It did not take the product.
Watch whether anybody bids above the floor for the app itself. If a buyer keeps it open past December, companion chat is still a business somebody wants to own. If the only money on the table is for the names and the staff, then this kind of product is worth more in pieces than it is running.
Securityweek.com
No data centre. No cloud bill. Just a stack of TV boxes from the bargain bin.
Anthropic's safety team bought a pile of cheap Android TV boxes and tried to get freely downloadable models to copy themselves from one device to the next, with nothing behind them. One model completed the whole cycle across eight machines, most of the times it tried. Nothing like it is loose in the wild yet, but the team expects other models to reach that level by the end of the year.
If you could only keep one, which would you want?
Source: Microsoft
The plan is to stop renting the expensive part.
Microsoft unveiled Maia 300, a chip of its own design built for running AI rather than training it, and says it will become the main system behind its own products, Copilot and GitHub included. The company claims about 40% more output from the same electricity as the generation it replaces. Production and the big deployments both start in 2027, so nothing changes this year.
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FOR PEOPLE BUILDING THE LIFE THEY WANT, NOW.
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Alibaba Put Eye Tracking On Its New Glasses – The Qwen Glasses N1 start at 2,999 yuan with a Pro model at 3,499, add eye tracking, payments and health tracking, and arrive alongside earbuds built with Bose.
Nvidia's China Share Fell To A Third – Research figures reported by Reuters put Nvidia at 34% of China's AI accelerator market in the first half of the year, with shipments down 44%, while Huawei almost doubled its own to take 28%.
The IMF Named AI A Stability Risk – Its latest financial stability report lists a correction in AI related assets among the most plausible near term triggers for a sharp tightening of global financial conditions, alongside a major cyber incident.
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Three stories about ownership, and how little of it anyone turns out to have. Character.AI owned a brand and rented its models, and the brand is the only part anyone wants to buy. Anthropic is working out what happens when a model needs nobody's permission to keep running. Microsoft looked at its own bill and decided the chip should belong to Microsoft. The question underneath all three is the same. When the thing stops working, who exactly is holding it.
Find out who is holding it.
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