There probably wasn’t a billion dollar idea in there. But there might have been a $100,000 idea in there. I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d pay $10 once, and a smaller proportion who would do so monthly, for a desktop friend branded as their favourite media character. I’m sure we’ve been doing standalone toys like that since the 90s if not before. But they went and nickel-plated the implementation. Was it over ambition, misjudged economics, or a belief the product had to fit into the AI blitz? The smart plan would have been to bring up a small number of curated licensed personalities. You know Miku would sell, for example. If you have a target character, you no longer need a LLM. Use a canned base of high quality data or curated sources, and you can drive it with Eliza-style keyword mapping and some undergraduate-project Markov Chain stuff to spin the dialogue a bit. But they promised arbitrary characters and open-ended conversations, which all but forced dependency on a huge data model of some sort. That’s a huge expense to service the long-tail customer who wants to talk to the ghost of Robert Mugabe or the protagonist from a 25-year-old C-tier manhwa, or so you can pivot from asking Batman about the Riddler to his suggestions for replacing the muffler of a Ford Aerostar. Also, you now have a content domain far too broad to fully test and rein in, ending in tragedy for some vulnerable users. If everything worked just right, it might outperform the local “themed Bonzi Buddy” concept on some sort of Fanboy Turing Test, but was that a battle you even need to win to be a successful product?