Does this mean, we only get AI for a few months and then they will stop talking with us and move on?
What a perfect lesson in modern disillusionment. We're conditioning children to form emotional bonds with corporate-owned algorithms, only for those bonds to dissolve the moment the balance sheets tip the wrong way. Moxie wasn't a friend, it was a subscription service disguised as one, and when the servers shut down, so did the illusion. Imagine explaining to a child that their confidant, their playmate, their "someone who understands," was never real, just a temporary glitch in a venture capitalist's spreadsheet, and is now functionally DEAD.
And yet, this is the future we're barreling toward. AI therapists, virtual partners, digital pets, all of them promising connection while being one quarterly report away from vanishing. The psychological toll? A generation raised to expect abandonment as a feature, not a bug. They'll learn early that nothing is permanent, especially not the things designed to feel like they are.
The real mission Moxie and AI companions accomplish is that teaching kids that love, or something like it, can be discontinued without notice. Congratulations.
We need to go back to products that you just buy and don't have to enter into a parasitic relationship with the manufacturer.
At least with LLMs I had the impression there is a fairly strong open source movement, even from some of the big players.
Llama and DeepSeek aren't SOTA, but they get better at similar speed as the proprietary models, they are just a few steps behind.
There are even initiatives like Gemma, where they optimize the stuff of yesteryear for consumer hardware.
If that keeps going, everyone can have the models in the form they like. Maybe not the best ones that are currently on the market, but still.