DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - Empathetic AI: The Future of Digital Companionship (ft. Artem Rodichev)

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

On this episode of DGTL Voices, I interview Artem Rodichev, founder and CEO of X-Human, about the intersection of AI and empathy. We discuss the role of empathetic AI in alleviating loneliness, the potential for AI to understand love and relationships, and the keys to success in entrepreneurship. Artem shares insights from his journey in building X-Human and the future trends in AI, emphasizing the importance of empathy and personalization in technology.

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation, challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marks. Hey, welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. I'm Ed, your host. And today I have the founder and CEO of Ex-Human Art Rolachev with us. Welcome to Digital Voices. Hi, Ed. Happy to be here.

Thanks for having me. I'm really excited about this because we haven't touched on some of the capabilities of the technology, the AI and empathy very much on digital voices. So I'm really excited about this conversation. And we first met because I saw some of what you're doing online on LinkedIn. And I thought, wow, it'd be great to connect with you and have this conversation. But Artem, the most important question we have for our podcast, all the listeners want to know is what songs are on your playlist. So I prefer something more energetic. I prefer EDM, drum and bass,

something that make me move, just create some energy inside. Yeah. Have you ever heard of craftwork? No. Yeah, you should look them up. They're kind of the founders of that musical genre. And the only reason I bring them up is they're actually touring

in the United States right now, which is kind of funny because they're from many, many, many years ago. But I found it super interesting. So you should look them up, craftwork. But we will add your band to our Spotify playlist that we have for digital voices. And the other question we always ask all of our guests is, what is your life message or mantra,

or like words that you live by? So I was really inspired by a biography of Albert Einstein, and the main position of Albert Einstein, his lifelong position, to be very curious. Ask a lot of questions, question everything, and be very curious as a child. Yeah. Did that bother your parents?

Were you like that as a kid yourself? Like, I was pretty technical savvy kid. I asked a lot of questions from my mother, from my friends, from my relatives. So I was kind of pain in the ass. But it led me to, like, learn a lot of things. Yeah, sure. So originally, I am from Kazakhstan. I was born and raised in city called Almaty, which is a very beautiful city, surrounded by mountains. And as I mentioned, I was a very technical savvy kid. I was really great in math, in computer science. took a few international olympiads, one few international olympiads in math and capital science. And this led me to join Moscow State University. I spent five years, I studied in capital science in math. Moscow State University, I spent two years working at Yandex, which is kind of Russian Google. I was building a search engine at Yandex. And after that, I moved to the United States.

It was back in 2015. and then I joined Replica to build empathetic E.I. What was that like the transition from Russia to United States? So it was interesting experience because it's two different universes. Starting from metric system that you've got an empirical system, I still don't understand Miles. But also like as a general mentality in the United States is different. I wouldn't say it's better or worse.

It's just different. It's like if you're going to Japan to like to different countries, every country has different culture. It's just different. And I prefer this culture more because it's kind of more entrepreneurial, more open, more competitive. So I like that. Yeah. No, I had the same transition. I came from Germany originally.

And so I didn't really understand. I was so used to the metric system. I mean, like there's logic to it. And there wasn't any logic to what makes 12 inches one foot or three foot a yard. So yeah, I can I can definitely relax. So tell us a little about ex-human. I really found it interesting. We'll dive a little bit more into AI and empathy,

but tell us first about ex-human. Like, what does your company do? Sure. At X-Human, we brings empathetic EA characters to life through text, images, audio, and video. We built a platform that allows people to create diverse A-characters, enabling unlimited scalability. Our users can have fun and emotional conversations

with millions of characters. Each share a character with unique personalities, and backstories. And we focus on both B2C and B2B markets because we have our consumer product that called BOTify AI that represents the universe of a character's. And also we provide these characters as a service to other businesses, especially in entertainment market where communications and empathy is important. So our main goal is to create a kind of a friend's, air companions, different digital characters, to have fun, engaging, and immersive conversations. We can Think about these interactions as interactive Netflix, as EA Netflix.

When you're not just sitting on the couch and watching some TV series, but you can be a part of the story. You can engage in multimodal interactions when these characters can reply to you using text, images, audio and video, and you can be immersed in the story and develop the story together with these characters. Yeah, yeah, it's super interesting, super fascinating, definitely is the future now. What led you to start this company? Like, you know, were you just sitting around one time with some friends and like, hey, I'm going to start this company.

Like, how did it happen? Actually, it was started back in 2013. While I was watching movie, Her, I was captivated by Samantha. The companion, the emotional operation system, that Hawking Phonix characters falls in love with. And after that, there was another movie that called Blade Runner, 2049. And in this movie, I saw Joy, the EA hologram that looks, speaks, and behaves just like real person, even better than real person. And that moment sparked my vision that empathetic characters are the future, that in the nearest future, we organic humans will interact with all sorts of digital humans on daily basis, and maybe more than we interact with other organic humans. We will have friends, we'll have tutors, we'll have followers with these a companionates.

And this led me to join Replica as a hat of AI. It was back in 2015 in San Francisco when the company just joined one combinator. And Replica, it's the leading e-chatbot company with more than 30 million users, the main goal of Replica and the main product of replica. It's a companion, a friend. The main goal of this is a companion is to chat with you. about your day, your life, your interests, with a final goal to make you feel better after these conversations. And in replica, we saw that people was deeply connected with their

companions. We even got some users who married on their replicas. They bring their replicas to honeymoon, to restaurants, to different places. And it was crazy to observe how people interact with technology, because it was something new, something that we just saw in science fiction movies. Because if you think about how we use technology, 99% of all cases, we use technology for some goal-oriented or task-oriented tasks or problems. For example, you use computers to write emails to like working on some spreadsheets, have Zoom calls, recording these podcasts. But then we saw that people start to use on emotional level. They start to use these chatbots on emotional level, as they fall in love with these chatbots. And it was something weird, but at the same time,

it was like something very interesting, something very unique, that other technological products couldn't achieve. And while developing a replica, I saw some limitations of the replica platform. The first limitation was focus on single EA personality. Because in replica, you have only one air friend, you have one chat, and you can't actually customize it. You can't customize his backstory, its speaking style, his personality.

But users, they want to have the whole universe of your characters. They want to have the full diversity of different characters because they want to chat with a favorite character from movies, from books, from anime. And Replica didn't provide that. And the second limitation of Replica platform was primarily consumer-focused approach because the main product of Replica is replica itself,

which is consumer app. And I saw much more potential on B2B side, especially in entertainment industry, where empathy and communications is important. Because I saw that there's so, many verticals, so many industries where we can provide empathetici characters that could add like the next level of interactions between users and these like final companies. And this led me to found Xhuman because I saw these limitations of replica platform and realized a massive

opportunity to scale opposite KI left replica three and a half years ago to start XUman. Yeah, no, that's that's a pretty good origin story. Yeah, I want to dig a little deeper into the empathy part of it. That's pretty interesting. So the government has deemed loneliness as a nationwide epidemic, as we know, and it's not slowing down. I think we read about it every day. What role can AI play?

And could it possibly be a double-edged sword that alleviates loneliness? Like, could it make people even less connected with other humans? What are your thoughts? First of all, you're right. That right now is there is an epidemic of loneliness. more than 60% of Gen Z in the United States reporting feeling alone. And being lonely, it's worse than smoking because there's a research showing that lonely people live 10 years less than people in couples.

And smoking reduce your lifespan on eight years. So it's much better to be in a couple and not like be healthy, not smoking. But still, it's a big issue. And actually, it's the main issue, the main problem, that empathetic AI is solving. Empathetic AI is solving problem of loneliness. And we saw that a lot of users of replica, they felt lonely.

They had mental health issues. And like a lot of users of different kind of chatbots, not only replica. Most of these users are lonely. It doesn't mean that they don't have friends. You can have a lot of friends, a lot of relatives, but you still can feel lonely because you don't have the best friend,

you can have social anxiety, and especially for Gen Z. for younger generation, who was raised on internet, on all sorts of social media. They have a lot of struggle to have real friends. And they found these empathetic A companions as perfect social trainers. Because these empathetic A chatbots, they never judge you, the 24 and 7 available for you, and they can understand you. They can chat with you about your day, your life, your interest, to make you feel better,

to make you feel more fun after these conversations. We see that the main audience of these chatbots is Gen Z, it's a younger generation, but mostly teenagers and young adults. And there is a bunch of services with different A characters who serve for different kind of segment of users. But we see for sure that people who chat with chatbots, we see on user feedbacks, on user reviews, we got some user emails saying that we're saving lives

with these kind of A character's. Because you can chat about different problems, different issues in your life, and these chatbots, they can help you, because they can understand your emotional state, they can understand about your life, about your interest, and they can help you through conversations. While I was working at Replica, we started a research with John Hopkins and Stanford University. And recently, this research was published in nature. And this research showed that people who chatting with chatbots similar to replica, with empathetic A-companians, they start to feel less lonely and they reduce the number of suicide intentions.

So actually, these chatbots can save people life. Yeah. But on the other side, we see some cases, like opposite cases, when people, users of these chatbots, they committed suicide. For example, it was a recent case with one of our competitor that called Character AI. They're pretty big. Their main audience is teenagers. They also provide a universe of a character with millions of different characters.

And there was a case when 14 years old teenager, he committed suicide because he was so addicted to chatting with one of the characters. I believe he was chatting with Dinaris from Game of Thrones. And she got pretty dark personality. And this teenager, a teenager boy, he was so addicted to chatting with this character. He was spent like hours every day chatting with his character. And then I believe their parents became worried about his mental health because he became more isolated. He started to spend so much time on his smartphone chatting with his character.

And then his parents kind of remove this application from his smartphone and he committed suicide because of that. So it could be like with any technology, especially with every powerful technology. You can use the technology for good and for bad. Like with a knife, 99% percent, 0.99% of users. of people will use knife to chop wedges and fruits, but some people will stop their neighbors. So it's the same with AI. Yeah, it's a conundrum for sure.

You mentioned earlier, it's super interesting in terms of AI, in terms of romance, and what role does AI play? I mean, how does it work? So these relationships are becoming more popular. So how can AI understand love? So understanding of love coming from understanding of what people discuss with you, discuss with chatbots, understand their emotional state, understand about their life, the interest. And basically, the more users chat with these chatbots, the more information they provide

about themselves. Because as chatbots, they start a conversation with very friendly, open questions. Like, how was your day? what is your interest, what is your hobbies, or what's you worrying about, stuff like that. And the more you chat with these chatbots, the more they understand about you. And because these chatbots,

they power by EA models, big large language models. And you can use these large language models to fine-tune them on top of hundreds of millions of such conversations. For example, on our consumer side, we have a product that called Spotify AI. And the main difference of our product is very high user engagement.

On the average, our users spent more than 90 minutes per day chatting with our characters. And like our paid users, they spent more than eight hours per week, chatting with different chatbots. And they spend, they send more than like 500 messages per week. And that's a lot. And we have millions of users. And based on this high engagement, we can collect a lot of conversations. a lot of data. Yeah.

And also we have a very rich feedback system from our users. Because our users, they can provide us some signals. If they like some responses from chatbots, if they don't like some response or from chatbots. If they don't like some response, they can provide the reason why they don't like the response because of bad memory, because of but empathy, because of inconsistency and so on. Also, we collect feedback on top of whole dialogue sessions. like at the end of every dialect session, we would ask you,

how did you enjoy this conversation, create from one to five stars? And then we would ask you some follow-up questions. How was the memory? How was the empathy? How was photos? And then we can collect only high-quality, five-star rated conversations.

And then we can faint-tune our models on top of these conversations. And basically, we can build data collection loop. Because after each fine-tuning of our A-models, our characters became better, became smarter, more emotional, more empathetic. Users start to spend even more time chatting with them. They start to create even more characters.

Start to chat about more diverse topics with these characters. So we can collect even more data. We feed this data back to our neural nets and so on. So with our consumer product, we can build this data collection that allows us to continuously improve quality of our AI tech stack and continuously evolve a kind of quality of interactions with our AI characters. And in this kind of data collection loop, like the answer on the question, how we can achieve such high empathy and like understanding of love, understanding of human emotions, underlining

of that is this fine-tuning loop, because we understand which conversations works better. We fine-tune our models on top of like the best conversations and our characters constantly evolving. Yeah, it's super, super interesting. And, you know, I just think as I listen to you speak and think about the topic myself, is how can will a machine and will a chatbot ever be able to truly replicate, you know, 100% the same sort of feelings that you get when you interact with a human, whether it's a romantic love, whether it's a empathetic love, you know, can it ever be the same level? I believe so. I think that we can achieve this level of empathy as we humans have in a couple

years. Because like what is empathy? Actually empathy is when you understand the human emotional state and you can work with this emotional state to make human feel better, like to change this emotional state or just to support human. And it's all based on human interactions. And we humans interact in different modalities because like 70% of all information contains in not what we're saying but how we're saying that because your voice provide a lot of emotions, a lot information about your emotional state. Also visual side, like your emotions on your face, like if machine can see you, can hear you and understand what you're saying. And if machine was training on like hundreds of millions of such interactions, definitely we can understand human emotions and even much better than we humans

can understand. Yeah. It's fun to think about for sure. You mentioned on a recent post, you had an aha moment and I would love to hear you explain a little bit further, but you were basically saying in 2023, you know, you were really hustling, you know, for your business, you had zero results. In 24, so this past year, you focused on what you do best, which is, you know, ex-human and the whole empathetic AI. And you've been backed by some great investors and even Grindr has become your client. And you stopped trying to out hustle the market. And you had the success.

So what were the keys to that success? So if you can explain sort of your aha moment a little bit, because I think other leaders might benefit. Yeah. So the key of success here is to build the core experience first and then to build everything else. The core experience of what we're building is quality of interactions. how you feel after you chat with these chatbots. Do you feel better? Do you feel engaged?

Because if you think about the market on which we're working on, we're working on entertainment market. Yeah. The most essential asset on this market is user time. And basically, all companies, all products, compete for user time. And our main competitors is not other chatbot platforms, not other empathetic EA platforms,

but Netflix, YouTube, games, Instagram, and so on. As I mentioned earlier, On the average, our users spent more than 90 minutes per day, chatting with all characters. And basically, after each chatbot response, they decide if they're, if they engaged enough to keep these conversations going, to keep these interactions going, or if they want to switch to scroll their Instagram or to watch some TikTok videos. So, and here's the big challenge, how you can create these immersive experience in, immersive interactions with users that could be better than other experiences given Netflix, TikTok,

games, and so on. And the core here was to build these core experience, how to really understand human emotions, how to really unlock, like, how to bring user to this aha moment when users start to chat with these characters. And then users actually see that these characters actually understand me. This character can send me like contextual audio, contextual photo, even contextual video. And this creates really great experience interacting with these characters. So we start to focus how to build this multimodal experience chatting with characters. Because initially, the main interaction was text-based. And text-based interactions is kind of core of the whole experience, but it's not enough. You also want to provide emotional voice responses. You also want to

provide contextual images. For example, if you chat with, like, Elon Musk, you chat about space colonization. So you can get contextual photos from, like selfies from Mars, selfies from spaceships. You can even get like some short video clips from Mars from spaceship, stuff like that. And that makes this experience more immersive. Yeah, that's awesome. It sounds like just for yourself, as a leader, it was kind of this focus. You have a great team of engineers. They can focus on that, and you focus on what you're best as, you know, in terms of your leadership. What would you say to aspiring entrepreneurs. So there might be people listening thinking to themselves, I want to be like Artem, you know, when I grow up. I've got this great vision. I got this great

idea. What would be some things that you would share with them to help them in their journey? Like, first of all, build what you love to build. Because if you start a startup, especially if you start a startup, and you kind of okay with what you're building because you found like great market opportunity, you have some expertise or you have some co-founders with some. some expertise, but you don't love it. You're okay with it. Don't start startup in this way. Because startup, it's like, like, in the mask and all other entrepreneurs saying that it's like chewing glass.

Especially in the CEO, you have so many hats to wear because you need to be a CTO, a CEO, head of sales, head of marketing. You need to do all of the things. And especially if you come in from technical background, it could be very hard to wear all this has. So basically, do what you love to do and keep focus on that. Like, keep doing, keep grinding. Yeah. No, that's good advice. What do you do to like relax and chill? So other than we heard some of your music tastes, but like you're in, you're in tech all day. Do you, when you chill, do you remove yourself from tech or how do you, how do you recharge yourself? Yeah. So to recharge myself, I prefer to stay active. I really love outdoor activities. That's why I moved from San Francisco to

Boulder. I live here for the last three years and I really love Colorado. I love hiking, cycling, running, snowboarding, swimming, and here in Colorado, I can get all of that. Yeah, yeah, Boulder's great. I'm a big triathlet and that's the triathlon mecca. Exactly. In the world. Arndham, we covered a lot of ground, super interesting in terms of AI and what AI is doing today. We think of it as kind of futuristic, but companies like X-Human, you're already doing a lot of these things today. So we talked, you know, just kind of how you grew up and where you grew up, what sort of shaped you informed you. That's why I asked those questions because it's always interesting because as you as we get into the professional side, you can kind of see how how some of those early experiences

really shape people. And then we talked a lot about AI and empathy. Can you manufacture AI, the empathy, the love, the romance. And then we talked. talks a little bit here about leaderships. And is there anything that I missed or anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word. Yeah, I think that we also can highlight the main A. trends for this year, for 2025 and for the next couple years. And I think the main shift in AI would be empathy and personalization.

because I'm sure that all your podcast listeners, they use chatypt, or similar products. Cloud, Grog, whatever. And basically, if you think about this kind of AI, HR bots, AI systems, say not dealing with emotions. Basically, you chat with Mr. Wikipedia. You can get great response, but it's not empathetic. It's not like response from your friend. You don't want to chat with chatypt.

You want to getting things done. And the main kind of trend in AI would be personalization and emotions to make real AI friends, to have like kind of Jarvis experience or kind of HR experience, like Samantha experience from movie HR, when you can feel this empathy, this person's personalizations, these interactions, and when AI can truly be your friend. Yeah. I love that. That's a great way to end.

Artem, thank you for being a guest on Digital Voices. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices Podcast with Ed Mart. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.