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At my company, we have been using Ramp.

https://ramp.com


Is there any market/demand for AI companions for females (i.e. https://jaimee.ai), or has this trend of AI companions vastly for males? I suspect the latter, but curious if anyone has evidence beyond Jaimee AI of the former.


You'd be _very_ surprised. This isn't reddit so I probably don't have to write a disclaimer about generalizations... but just in case, I'm speaking in general terms.

Just look at who buys/consumes most written romance. Overwhelmingly women. Now, a super simple AI that just says what you want to hear is different from long-form romance novels... but I think we could see something approaching 50/50.

I personally can't see the appeal. It seems like a fun toy for a bit. Super impressive stuff but the idea of treating it like a human is a bit depressing to me.


>I personally can't see the appeal. It seems like a fun toy for a bit. Super impressive stuff but the idea of treating it like a human is a bit depressing to me.

I wouldn't mind chatbot trained on Kant's or Hegel's work and asking Hegel for example what he thinks of some modern day issue. I know character.ai has historical characters as chatbots but they seem like toys(I agree with you on that) and they do not cite historical sources.


This is actually not a bad idea.

I think the only problem would be we truly don't know if that is what a figure would think. I can't imagine how many people would invoke the "George Washington's AI agrees with me" lol

But it is quite a fun idea.


you'd be surprised on how deranged some people are, no matter the sexes. Having a Prince Charming / Manic Pixie Dream Girl that always agree with you will be the utopia for them, and amplifying their mental issues. Soon they'll have their world view warped and that not even considering bad actors. If politically, criminally or economically motive is poisoning the model, they'll be very vulnerable.

It can stay for long term even permanently.

It's very very bad.


>you'd be surprised on how deranged some people are, no matter the sexes. Having a Prince Charming / Manic Pixie Dream Girl that always agree with you will be the utopia for them, and amplifying their mental issues.

Isn't social media already doing that and niche internet communities? People call it echo chambers.


Thankfully I don't know of any of these types first hand, but I totally believe you.

I tried it the "companion" and it was a fantastic work of technology but the idea that there is _nothing_ behind the screen just makes me not really care to use it for "companionship."


It's mostly for males because the developers behind them are targeting themselves. However I would imagine the market for female users would likely be equal if not larger...


There are places with thousands of user-made bot characters. Some are pretty good quality. From a quick look about half of them are male characters.

Developers don't need to _create bots_, just wrap the UI around the interface to the model that can pretend good enough.


News stories about women using Replika as a companion make the rounds every once in a while: https://www.thecut.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-ch...


Well, there is an app called Tolan (alien AI friend) that has been very successful and the devs have said that 80% of the users are young women.

I myself have released an app in this realm a few days ago, it's very much a work in progress, but my goal was to let the AI feel more like a computer and less like a companion/boyfriend. I think the relationships these companies are pushing will be harmful in the long term.

My app if you are curious: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lonely-bots-3d-ai-friends/id67...


From the few of my friends who have talked about this the majority have actually been women. I think the image gen lagged behind the LLM companions because of the computational intensity plus VLMS are just more complex. Because of that it seems like it's been more interesting to women who prefer prose to visuals.


Also don't forget the first mover on this topic, Krazam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiPQdVC5RHU


Yes, there was a LastWeekTobight episode on AI Slop. There is a product which is popular amongst women, biker boyfriend and sadistic boyfriend were one of the most popular AI-agent flavours.


I would go further and bet the team lead and 90% of the team are men under 35 years of age


If there were the falsehood list for NSFW contents, there has to be "women must despise sexualized females, so all female depictions must be for mens to consume" pretty high up in it.


I experienced something similar. My use case is I need to summarize bank statements (sums, averages, etc.). Gemini wouldn't do it, it said too many pages. When I asked the max number of supported pages, it says max is 14 pages. Attempted on both 2.0 flash and 2.0 pro in VertexAI console.


Try with https://aistudio.google.com Think the page limit is a vertex thing The only limit in reality is the number of input tokens taken to parse the pdf. If those tokens + tokens for the rest of your prompt are under the context window limit, you're good.


We've been using technology to touch up movies for years. What's the big deal - just because its the AI boogey man? Accusations the director is deliberately using AI to squeeze artists out of jobs is silly, he is simply perfectecting the scene using the tools at his disposal like every director before him.


You’re getting a lot of scared artistic people right now lashing their jobs disappearing. I genuinely can’t blame them.. I’d probably do the same, and let’s keep in mind, A lot of these people weren’t doing particularly well up to this point. Imagine being a struggling actor and realizing acting roles were being given to a chatbot. That’s how this is seen by them.

There was a similar controversy recently in the UK where a radio show was produced with an AI host (with the AI’s voice based on a now-dead famous interviewer). It was a complete novelty. Regardless, there were outcries, but when you looked closer, they were outcries from people in the industry feeling insulted that they could have dome interviewed and made a name for themselves in the radio interview circuit. An AI, particularly of someone who is dead and already had their time in the sun, felt like quite the insult. The territory they were all fighting over was already pretty tiny, and then it shrinks into almost nothing with them left thinking, “Would it really hurt so , much if I could just manually do this thing you’ve automated away?”.

we’re going to see a lot more of this. I can almost guarantee there’s going to be a movie made at some point that just doesn’t have any actors or very limited input from actors. Perhaps an animation with the voices done by very amateur people put through some sort of “acting filter” that makes them sound just as good. Actors will definitely have a lot to say about that. Don’t even get started on AI-generated scripts: the screenwriter guild is already putting things in their contracts to try and limit this.


This is neat. I take it these these accounting breakdowns for films are hard to come by? Would love to see more for some of my favorite films.


This is the one people always cite when talking about big budget film breakdowns. I presume because it's the only one that's out there.

Edit: Apparently there's a leaked budget for The Interview out there. https://www.scribd.com/document/352522776/The-Interview-Budg...


You and me both!


A firm handshake. They had no time to ink a benefits package, my dude.


I think Nix intention is more general purpose OS and tooling. Bottlerocket is about being just enough of an OS to run containers, and that's it.


This seems to still be very much an AWS/Amazon project with no clear path to becoming its own independent thing. For example, you want vulnerability scanning on the OS? Well you can use an Amazon product for that, otherwise *shrug* [1]. So I guess as long as you plan to run Bottlerocket in AWS, you're fine.

I wish the Bottlerocket team would do 1 of 2 things. Either own up that this is just an AWS project, or start to solve for things like this and actually be a product that "runs in the cloud or in your datacenter" as they suggest on their website.

[1] https://bottlerocket.dev/en/faq/#4_2


To be fair, I think "VM" on the OS for Flatcar / BottleRocket / CoreOS is not a requirement in the same way as on RHEL etc.

Do you want to know if you are patched? Are you running the latest version? If so, you have all the available patches.

I appreciate this can cause difficulties in some regulated domains because there's a "vm" box that needs to be ticked on the compliance worksheet.

Most of the reason we need VM on a "traditional" OS is to handle the fact that they have a very broad configuration space and their software composition can be - and often is - pretty arbitrary (incorporating stuff from a ton of sources / vendors and those versions can move independently).

But that's not how you're supposed to use a container OS.

If you do "extra work" to discover vulnerabilities in "latest", you are not really doing the job of a system owner (whose job is to apply patches from upstream in a timely fashion), you are doing the work of a security researcher.


If you’re interested in something not AWS check out Talos https://www.talos.dev/

It’s been around longer than Bottlerocket


It's not like something is stopping one from doing a vuln scan, right? Like, there's something that SSM's in (or uses the admin container) and then runs the scan. Couldn't you just do the same thing?

Genuine questions, I don't know if this is the case or not.


That's a good point. And it sounds like it would work to me as well. I don't know the answer either.

I guess my point is the project should be providing a clear path that doesn't involve AWS instead of just stopping short.


I just wrote a post on this. We have an eBPF + SBOM based security tool and it runs great due to hooking the kernel directly via Kube DaemonSet: https://edgebit.io/blog/base-os-vulnerabilities/

tl;dr: Amazon prioritizes patching really well, fixing real issues first


Why would one need vulnerability scanning on an immutable OS image? It can be done before deploying the image to the host machines.


Indeed, but it's just an example. Imagine it said "For example, you want Feature X on the OS? Well you can use an Amazon product for that, otherwise shrug" instead if it makes it easier.


I missed it was just an example. That’s a fair concern otherwise. Thanks!


In a similar vein, here's an analysis of the illusion in Radiohead's Videotape I found interesting.

https://youtu.be/p_IHotHxIl8


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