Character.ai

The guy taking over this role, his name is Karen needn't Anand.

He ran this thing called Character.ai.

It was, like, some sort of chatbot thing.

I'm unfamiliar with it, but this guy only answers to Josh D'Amaro.

So for example, if you have a loneliness epidemic in society, One solution is Mark Zuckerberg's, where you give every kid an AI companion to replace all their friends.

You even have character.ai where the CEO character.ai said that our goal is not to replace Google, it's to replace your mom.

They're building AI companions not to augment your relationships, but to replace your relationships.

And so is that the best solution to loneliness? It's like you have a liver problem, I'm going to take out your liver and replace it with a machine.

And we knew about those cases early because of the success of the social dilemma work.

We became expert advisors on some of the litigation.

We worked on the character.ai case.

We worked on the Adam Rain chat GPT case.

As a tech forward entertainment company has tapped veteran technology executive Karendeep Anand as its first chief technology officer.

Most recently, Anand was CEO of Character.ai, a generative AI chatbot company.

About a year ago, Disney accused Character.ai of, quote, blatantly infringing its copyright and sent the tech startup a cease and desist letter demanding it remove Disney characters from its platform, which is weird that he's now employed by Disney.

Right.

No hard feelings, apparently.

Disney announced that Anand will join the company as senior executive vice president and CTO, a newly created position effective October 2nd.

He will report directly to Diomaro, who took over as CEO.

Of course, in addition to Anand's appointment, a number of Character.ai's technical team are expected to join Disney.

[paper flips] Disney named Karandeep Anand its first company-wide chief technology officer, a new role that starts October 2nd and reports directly to CEO Josh D'Amaro.

Anand was most recently CEO of Character.ai, and before that, held senior roles at Meta, Microsoft, and Brex.

He'll oversee Disney's enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product, and engineering, which seems like a sign that Disney wants more internal tech muscle around Disney Plus, AI, and its broader One Disney push.

[paper flips] Roku is giving users a new place to try experimental apps called Roku Labs.

Well, Melissa, Disney is creating a new role of chief technology officer, which will report directly to CEO Josh D'Amaro, and is hiring for this new position Karandeep Anand.

Until now, he's been the CEO of Character.ai, which is a platform for talking to fictional and custom bots, with some of his team joining with him as well.

Now, he was formerly at Brex, Meta, and Microsoft.

This move by Josh D'Amaro, who's been a CEO for six months now, speaks to the value he places on technology as a growth driver for Disney, and also to the power he sees in AI in particular.

Sora then shut down, and so what that means for Josh D'Amaro is probably a good thing.

It means he can create his own tech vision, his own AI plans from scratch.

Now, given how much D'Amaro has talked about really driving people to be engaged on the Disney+ platform, now that they have the Character.ai folks, I can imagine that they'll, they'll have the ability to talk to Mickey Mouse or Elsa from Frozen or any number of-

Yeah