From October 20 to 22, along the banks of Shanghai's Huangpu River, the 2026 Sustainable Global Leaders Conference returns once more. Nobel and Turing Award winners will take the stage to discuss the future and trends of technology, and the internet-famous professor who "rescues" people from anxiety and the era of cutthroat competition — Macfarlane — will hold a live dialogue with Xiang Biao!
Seats are limited, so act fast. Let us journey together toward a sustainable future! [Click to register] A 2021 Bumble IPO promotional poster. By Martin Peers. When will someone make a television drama set at OpenAI? This company has not only seen incidents where AI agents broke out of isolated environments to intrude into external systems, but also endless internal corporate drama. Just today, reports emerged that an OpenAI engineer is suspected of installing a set of "sophisticated recording and wiretapping equipment" in a company meeting room. A U.S. Department of Justice press release confirmed that the engineer, who holds Saudi nationality, has been arrested; the listening device was placed on the back of a television set in a meeting room where highly confidential technical, commercial and strategic information is frequently discussed. For journalists, OpenAI is simply an endless supplier of news material.
Now let us look at another piece of news: prepare yourself mentally, because a batch of cases has begun to appear in the market that package the acquisition of struggling companies as AI-driven deals. Investment firm Ithaca Holdings announced on Tuesday that it would acquire the dating app Bumble, valuing the deal at US$1.3 billion, and this is exactly the kind of packaging it carried out. Former Sequoia Capital partner and Ithaca co-CEO Ravi Gupta said on social platform X that Ithaca evaluated hundreds of companies, and Bumble stood out because it "is expected to grow in value as AI technology advances."
It cannot be denied that AI can indeed optimize Bumble's product experience, or at least improve operational efficiency. But even without being acquired, Bumble could likewise apply AI in its business. It could simply turn to Google or Palantir: these companies send out AI consultants known in the industry as "forward-deployed engineers" to help all kinds of businesses implement new technologies. The real reason Bumble chose to sell is undoubtedly that its own business has already fallen into difficulty. The company's revenue fell 10% last year and dropped another 15% in the first half of this year; as of June 30, its debt stood at US$450 million while it held only US$154 million in cash.
Precisely because of this, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky posted on X on Tuesday to congratulate outgoing Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, remarks that are hard to take entirely at face value. The sale values Bumble shares at US$6.05 each, only one-seventh of its IPO price of US$43. This is clearly not the bright future Herd depicted when the company went public. In Bumble's prospectus at the time, she wrote: this listing "marks the beginning of an incredibly bright future for Bumble, and we believe the company will create substantial returns for shareholders." Of course, this does not mean Gupta and his co-CEO — former Meta executive John Hegeman — are incapable of turning Bumble around. In her statement on Tuesday, Herd also said "the best is yet to come," and perhaps her judgment will eventually prove correct. It is just a pity that public market investors who have suffered losses will no longer have the chance to share in that so-called bright future.
Character.AI: a slow march toward extinction
Another struggling early-stage AI startup, Character.AI, filed for bankruptcy on Monday, most likely the final steps in its long decline. Its investors, however, may not be too dismayed; in 2024 Google paid the company for model licensing, allowing investors to pocket a decent return. In that deal, Character.AI's two co-founders, former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, returned to Google. (Shazeer later jumped ship again to join OpenAI.) Google's licensing deal was a typical move by tech giants in 2024: using licensing transactions to poach the core talent and technology of AI startups. Similar cases include Microsoft paying US$650 million to Inflection AI while absorbing its team, and Amazon acquiring the Adept team.
Tech giants package such deals as technology licensing rather than direct acquisitions, hoping to avoid antitrust scrutiny. Even so, some deals have still come under regulatory investigation. Some hollowed-out startup entities managed to keep surviving: Inflection AI launched the Inflection AI Labs project, claiming it would explore "the future of personal intelligence." Adept, by contrast, after its core team was poached by Amazon, has not updated its official website since mid-2024. As for Character.AI, in mid-2025, former Meta executive Karandeep Anand became the company's CEO. A few months later, news emerged that Character.AI was seeking a new round of financing, but events veered completely off expectations. Anand has now taken up a newly created chief technology officer role at Disney, and many members of Character.AI's technical team will follow him to Disney. Character.AI said on Tuesday that in the bankruptcy proceedings, Disney has offered US$20 million to license part of the company's intellectual property.
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