LAUSD shelves its hyped AI chatbot to help students after collapse of firm that made it

The school district said it dropped its dealings with AllHere, the company that created "Ed," the sun-shaped chatbot, after "we were notified of their financial collapse." AllHere did not respond to an inquiry this week from The Times and the level of its operation is unclear. In a separate development, a major data breach has affected a data cloud company called Snowflake, which has worked with L.A. Unified. The district said Tuesday that there is no connection to the AllHere situation, and that it is working with investigative agencies to assess the damage and which district records were obtained through a third-party contractor. Meanwhile, the district unplugged the chatbot -- for which AllHere had been paid 3 million -- on June 14, less than three months after unveiling the animated figure as an easy-to-use, conversational companion for students and a soon-to-be-indispensable guide for parents.