🤖 Lawsuit Claims Character.AI is Responsible for Teen’s Suicide

Subscribe | AI Toolkit | Meet The Team

Welcome back AI enthusiasts!

In today’s AI Report:

• 📑Lawsuit Claims Character.AI is Responsible for Teen’s Suicide

• 📦a16z Stockpiles Over 20,000 Advanced Computing Chips

• 👟Meta’s AI Team Tackles Inference Speed

• 🛠Trending Tools

• 💰Funding Frontlines

• 💼Who’s Hiring?

Read Time: 3 minutes

🗞RECENT NEWS

AI SAFETY DEBATE

📑Lawsuit Claims Character.AI is Responsible for Teen’s Suicide

Character.AI, a startup that builds custom conversational chatbots, is being sued after a 14-year-old boy committed suicide.

Key Details:

• The 14-year-old boy’s mother, Megan Garcia, filed a lawsuit alleging wrongful death, deceptive trade practices, and product liability.

• The lawsuit states that Character.AI was “unreasonably dangerous,” lacking age-appropriate safety measures while being marketed to children.

• The deceased teenager, Sewell Setzer III, was an active Character.AI user. He’d always chat with conversational chatbots from the popular series Game of Thrones, including Daenerys Targaryen.

• According to the lawsuit, he committed suicide just “seconds” after his last interaction with the conversational chatbot.

• Character.AI hosts several mental health-focused conversational chatbots, such as “Therapist” and “Are you Feeling Lonely?”. He interacted with them constantly.

• The lawsuit cites an interview where Character.AI Founder Noam Shazeer explained that he launched the startup because “there’s just too much brand risk in large companies to ever launch anything fun.”

• Character.AI released a statement: “We’re heartbroken by the tragic loss of one of our users and want to express our deepest condolences to the family.”

• In a blog post, the startup announced new safety measures, including a revised disclaimer that reminds users “AI isn’t a real person” and pop-ups triggered by self-harm comments.

🚨Listen to Garcia share her son’s story on CBS Mornings here.

🩺 PULSE CHECK

ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ (A16Z)

📦a16z Stockpiles Over 20,000 Advanced Computing Chips

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) secured over 20,000 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs to provide for AI startups at below-market rates in exchange for equity.

Key Details:

• a16z is a Venture Capital (VC) firm that invests in early-stage technology startups in exchange for equity (i.e., “ownership”).

• The initiative is called “Oxygen” because the Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs give AI startups “some breathing room.”

• For the past several years, Big Tech companies like Amazon, Tesla, and Microsoft have been in a bidding war for Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs, winning deals by offering larger contracts.

• As a result, this leaves AI startups out to dry since they can’t compete with these larger contracts.

• “Various AI startups we serve every day had a common problem,” said a16z General Partner Anjney Midha. “They were being deprioritized over Big Tech companies.”

• Luma Labs AI is an early participant in the “Oxygen” initiative, citing access to Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs as a primary factor for choosing a16z.

• Over the past two years, a16z has invested heavily in Generative AI (GenAI), including funding for notable companies like xAI, Mistral AI, and OpenAI.

Why It’s Important:

• a16z is selling “shovels” during a “gold rush.” They’re stockpiling Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs (i.e., “shovels”) and offering them to AI startups (i.e., “miners”) at below-market rates without being directly involved in the gold mining (i.e., “AI development”).

• In exchange, a16z gets equity in the AI startups, which gives the VC firm a stake in the potential payoff (i.e., “gold”) if they’re successful.

🚨Listen to Midha explain the “Oxygen” initiative on the a16z podcast here.

AI RESEARCH

👟Meta’s AI Team Tackles Inference Speed

Meta’s AI Team developed “LayerSkip,” a method to speed up the Inference Speed of Large Language Models (LLMs).

Inference Speed refers to how quickly LLMs can process user queries (i.e., “prompts”) to generate outputs (i.e., “responses”). Improving the Inference Speed of LLMs is challenging because of their computational requirements and memory demands, which fuel energy costs.

“LayerSkip” leverages Layer Dropout and Early Exit Loss to solve this issue. These AI frameworks optimize the training processes by preventing Overfitting, which occurs when AI models learn the training data too well. This leads to poor performance on unseen data.

Layer Dropout randomly deactivates Neurons during the training process, encouraging LLMs to explore different combinations of Neurons. Neurons are like tiny decision-makers. They take in information, process it, and decide whether to pass it on to the next Neuron. Think of them as the building blocks of LLMs.

To complement this, Early Exit Loss offers a shortcut for LLMs. Instead of going through the entire training process, LLMs can take these shortcuts if they’re confident they have the correct response.

By optimizing the training process using these AI frameworks, “LayerSkip” significantly improves the Inference Speed of LLMs without sacrificing accuracy or performance.

🛠TRENDING TOOLS

🧺Rendair creates hyper-realistic 3D renders.

⚙️OttoGrid automates manual research with AI agents.

📊Trag reviews code based on your specific instructions.

🛒Hero uses AI to scan, price, and list your stuff in seconds.

💬Relplio transforms surveys into conversational interviews.

🔮Browse our always Up-To-Date AI Tools Database.

💰FUNDING FRONTLINES

• Sensei raises a $16M Series A to expand its contactless store platform in Europe.

• Granola closes a $20M Series A for a notepad app that records meetings and augments notes.

• Highlight AI secures a $10M Seed Round to scale its cross-platform AI assistant called “Highlight.”

💼WHO’S HIRING?

• The Walt Disney Co. (Anaheim, CA): Revenue Management Analyst, Summer 2025

• TikTok (San Jose, CA): Machine Learning {ML} Engineer Intern, TikTok TV, Summer 2025

• Microsoft (Redmond, WA): Research Intern, Applied Sciences Group, Computer AI Agents, Summer 2025

• HeyGen (San Francisco, CA): Software Engineer, New College Grad 2025

• Nvidia (Santa Clara, CA): Research Scientist, Autonomous Vehicles, New College Grad 2025

🤖PROMPT OF THE DAY

RESUME SCREENING

📋Resume Screening Techniques

Develop an advanced resume screening technique tailored for [Company Type] that focuses on identifying candidates with [Specific Skills or Qualifications] that possess [Key Hiring Criteria].

Make sure to include behavioral questions, skills assessments, and a cultural fit assessment.

Company Type = [Insert Here]

Specific Skills or Qualifications = [Insert Here]

Key Hiring Criteria = [Insert Here]

📒FINAL NOTE

FEEDBACK

❤️TAIP Review of The Day

REFER & EARN

🎉Your Friends Learn, You Earn!

You currently have 0 referrals, only 1 away from receiving ⚙️Ultimate Prompt Engineering Guide.

Refer 3 friends to learn how to 👷‍♀️Build Custom Versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Copy and paste this link to friends: https://theaipulse.beehiiv.com/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER