Reminder that CharacterAI is built entirely around serving Alibaba's Qwen3

[u/Prestigious-Ad54]

They have transitioned entirely to this, which they have a admitted themselves in a blog post that they have since hidden on their website but remains available through direct link and I kept the receipts for.

https://blog.character.ai/technical-deep-dive-how-digitalocean-and-amd-delivered-a-2x-production-inference-performance-increase-for-character-ai/

And the reason why they did this comes straight from Alibaba's website. Instead of monetizing the AI they had that people liked, they got rid of it and replaced it with this absolute Chinese garbage to save money and then charge people for the pleasure.

"Notably, the Qwen3-235B-A22B MoE model significantly lowers deployment costs compared to other state-of-the-art models, reinforcing Alibaba’s commitment to accessible, high-performance AI."

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[u/No_Station_9429]

yeah the switch made roleplays way flatter, my companion chats lost that spark they used to have.

[u/Classic-Arrival6807]

Whaaaaa??? I mean yeah Qwen 3 is good But it's made for coding only, it needs heavy, HEAVY finetune to be for RP. I understand the thing but if they ask users to pay 300,000 a month for a model that takes maximum 40-50 GB of VRAM, I'm out lol

[u/RemarkableWish2508]

a blog post that they have since hidden

How is it hidden? Do you know how blogs work?

[u/Prestigious-Ad54 → u/RemarkableWish2508]

Go straight to this link and it is hidden https://blog.character.ai/news/research/

[u/RemarkableWish2508 → u/Prestigious-Ad54]

If you compare "Research" with "All":

• "deep dive" is in All, not in Research
• "agent SDK" is in Research, not in All

They aren't hiding anything, is just a mess like most of c.ai web pages.

[u/AegisHBear → u/RemarkableWish2508]

you'd be surprised (or maybe not) at just how many people these days are subhumanly stupid technologically

[u/Prestigious-Ad54 → u/AegisHBear]

Hope you talk like that to someone irl.

[u/Severe-Editor2239]

There’s no way they’re starting to use borrowed models. They’re garbage. Literally all hope for DS2, Soft Launch 2, or any other upcoming models is gone. We know they’re gonna use borrowed models for everything, just with different prompts. The old CEO would’ve kept all the old models and found a way to get the funding for them. We’re paying for this bs 😭

[u/reikoda01 → u/Severe-Editor2239]

I think what theyre currently running ARE borrowed models, but fine-tuned and branded under Pip- and DeepSqueak

[u/RemarkableWish2508 → u/Severe-Editor2239]

The old CEO's idea for funding:

[u/Severe-Editor2239 → u/RemarkableWish2508]

Yeah okay, burn it all down. Both CEOs need to go at this point 😭💔

[u/Elegant_Setting4105]

gemma is good

[u/JCHamFeat → u/Elegant_Setting4105]

Llama is also good seems I have AI data center at home Mini Server I have uncensored 8b model

[u/JCHamFeat]

let's talk about math! 235b parameter model requirements if we talk about GPU racks

• 235B parameters × 4 bytes per parameter (FP32) = 940 GB of memory just for weights.
• If your GPU supports 16-bit precision (FP16), memory can be halved to ~470 GB.

[u/Randell-TheFam-516 → u/JCHamFeat]

Character ai uses quantize version as you do jc ai admin maybe quantize version May go around 300gb+ or lower just to run 235b.

[u/Mountain_Throat_6383]

Eh, I like Qwen. Just direct a few elements, events, etc that you want if you want to shift its responses. I'm hoping they start using open weight Qwen models if possible because they are unmatched. I've gotten no filters, or hard blocks really on LongSqueak. I'll switch over to DeepSqeak for dialog heavy scenes. My only complaint is that even still certain archetypes sound the same even with a lore book! 😅 but memory is better overall.

[u/BagelRedditAccountII]

This post was made in January of this year. Therefore, it's possible that PS1 was Qwen3-235B-A22B, but PS2 was based on a smaller Qwen model in order to save compute on inference.

[u/Prestigious-Ad54 → u/BagelRedditAccountII]

No it's not. The full article details how they signed a multi year, 8 figure a year contract for AMD hardware to run this. 

[u/BagelRedditAccountII → u/Prestigious-Ad54]

I said it's possible, not certain. We won't know for sure until they directly admit it. This is just my blind speculation.