5mo ago

I can't believe we left him behind like that.

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Fun fact: Back in the early 2000’s Ask Jeeves seriously considered getting into adult/porn searches. They went so far as to create a companion character to the Jeeves butler that was their brand back then. It was a blonde in a skimpy French maid outfit that they called Mimi, and they even went so far as to register domains like askmimi.com and asksex.com before they scrapped the whole project.
Source: I worked for them for a good part of the 2000’s.
- Maybe they were just too early, because apparently search tool "companions" are a thing now.
  
  The fact that Elon Musk is obsessed with Death Note is terrifying.
  
  Does it like animate responses or something?
  
  I haven't used it, but my understanding is that it's just an animated character for interacting with the Grok AI, except it's flirty and has "relationship building" mechanics... Probably not the little animal guy though, I hope.
  
  Like, what, you level up with it like a dating sim? I'm creeped out already, just the only things I can think of that melonball would do are even creepier.
  
  I'm not quite sure how structured it is or how far it goes, but I read that the romance-able ones will at least get more affectionate and change into skimpier clothes. It sounds ridiculous, but I think this is just the beginning of this type of stuff. I remember seeing a clip of a man who had "fallen in love with" and "proposed" to his chatGPT girlfriend.
  There are also already dedicated subreddits where people are building "boyfriends/girlfriends" with LLMs and getting attached.
  
  People are free to do as they wish and they aren't hurting anyone, but also yikes on bikes
  
  Damn, they have a whole damn sub for this? Depressing...
  
  I ... Yow. That Rick Sanchez one says a lot about the person who fantasizes being in that relationship.
- That sounds like a fun time to have been part of the tech universe, I presume it was the bounce back from the dotcom boom.
  
  It happened at the height of the boom. Ask Jeeves bought our company for over $500 million. As part of the acquisition I and many others were awarded with a hefty pile of stock options, but those options were locked up for a year or so in order to encourage us to stay at the new company. On paper, at the time of the acquisition, my stock options were worth well over $1 million, and the stock price of Jeeves was somewhere around $110.
  By the time I could exercise my stock options a year later they were worth under $10,000 and the company stock price was under $1. We were lucky to survive the bubble burst…
  Prior to all that it was pretty amazing. Our startup had a game room with pinball, pool, ping pong, etc. and we’d regularly have major discussions while playing a game. The company also bought us lunch every Friday for the better part of two years. And we had a really amazing team of engineers & leaders running the place. I’ve kept in touch with a number of those folks over the years, and have a number of those connections to thank for more than one job I’ve held after that one.
- I wonder if they'd still be around had they pivoted to the internet's true purpose.
  
  No. Their leaders at the time weren’t that smart.
  I actually worked for a startup that they acquired in January of 2000. As a search startup we had developed a relatively basic text-based advertising system that let folks bid on search terms and get their ads displayed on the search results pages. It was almost 100% automated and we referred to it internally as something that generated “free money” for us.
  The executives at Jeeves sold that cash cow off when they acquired us. They said “we’re not in the advertising business”. In October of that same year the company we sold it to relaunched it as Google AdWords.
  
  ask.com still exists
  
  Ask cats?
- That's amazing, I wish we got that timeline, ahahah!
  Oh, sure, yes, we're all friends with Tom... but are you friends with Mimi? All you gotta do is ask =P

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