Lex Fridman Podcast - #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion

Episode Date: September 5, 2020

Eugenia Kuyda co-founder of Replika, an AI companion. Please check out our sponsors to get a discount and to support this podcast: - Dollar Shave Club: https://dollarshaveclub.com/lex - DoorDash: download app & use code LEX - Cash App: download app & use code "LexPodcast" Episode links: Eugenia's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ekuyda Replika's Twitter: https://twitter.com/myreplika Replika's Website: https://replika.ai If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/podcast or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. Here's the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 - Introduction 06:18 - Loneliness 13:54 - Can AI alleviate loneliness? 18:13 - Love 20:49 - Russia in the 1990's 31:47 - Chernobyl 41:35 - Communism 49:21 - Losing a friend 57:55 - Mortality 1:10:41 - Replika origin story 1:59:37 - Bringing people back to life with AI 2:05:37 - Relationship with Replika 2:18:27 - Can you form a connection with text alone? 2:27:45 - Does an AI companion need a body? 2:30:20 - Her 2:37:24 - GPT-3 for conversation 2:43:48 - We should be nice to AI 2:46:52 - Book recommendations 2:53:45 - Russian language 2:58:41 - Meaning of life

The following is a conversation with Eugenia Kui Da, co-founder of replica, which is an app that allows you to make friends with an artificial intelligence system, a chatbot that learns to connect with you on an emotional, you can even say a human level by being a friend. For those of you who know my interest in AI and views on life in general, know that replica and Eugenia's line of work is near and dear to my heart. The origin story of replica is grounded in a personal tragedy of Eugenia losing her close friend, Roman Mazerunki, who was killed crossing the street by a hidden run driver in late 2015. He was 34. The app started as a way to grieve the loss of a friend by training a chatbot and neural net on text messages between Eugenia and Roman. The rest is a beautiful human story as we talk about with Eugenia. When a friend mentioned Eugenia's work to me, I knew I had to meet her and talk to her.

I felt before, during and after that this meeting would be an important one in my life, and it was, I think in ways that only time will truly show to me and others. She is a kind and brilliant person, it was an honor and a pleasure to talk to her. Quick summary of the sponsors, DoorDash, DollarShaveClub, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that deep, meaningful connection between human beings and artificial intelligence systems is a lifelong passion for me. I'm not yet sure where that passion will take me, but I decided some time ago that I will follow it boldly and without fear,

just as far as I can take it. With a bit of hard work and a bit of luck, I hope I'll succeed in helping build AI systems that have some positive impact on the world and on the lives of a few people out there. But also, it is entirely possible that I am in fact one of the chatbots that Eugenia and the replica team have built. And this podcast is simply a training process for the neural net that's trying to learn to connect to human beings. One episode at a time. In any case, I wouldn't know if I was or wasn't. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you.

If you enjoyed this thing, subscribe by YouTube, review it with 5 stars and not a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I'll try to make these interesting, but give you time stamp so you can skip. But please do still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description to get a discount by whatever they're selling. It really is the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club. Try them out with one time

offer for only five bucks and free shipping and DollarShave.com slash Lex. The starter kit comes with a six-blade razor, refills, and all kinds of other stuff that makes shaving feel great. I've been a member of DollarShave Club for over five years. It actually signed up when I first heard about them on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. And now, friends, we have come full circle. It feels like I made it. Now that I can do a read for them, just like Joe did all those years ago. Back when he also did ads for some less reputable companies, let's say, that you know about if you're a true fan of the old school

podcasting world. Anyway, I just used the razor and the refills, but they told me I should really try out the shave butter. I did. I love it. It's translucent somehow, which is a cool new experience. Again, try the ultimate shave starter set today for just 5 bucks plus free shipping at dollarshaveclub.com slash Lex. This show is also sponsored by DoorDash. You get $5 off and zero delivery fees in your first order of 15 bucks or more when you

download the DoorDash app and enter code you guessed it, Lex. Have so many memories of working late nights for a deadline with a team of engineers, whether that's for my PhD at Google or MIT, and eventually taking a break to argue about which DoorDash restaurant to order from. at Google, RMIT, and eventually taking a break to argue about which DoorDash restaurant to order from. And when the food came, those moments of bonding, of exchanging ideas, of pausing, to shift attention from the programs, the humans, or special. For a bit of time, I'm on my own now, so I miss that camaraderie, but actually I still

use DoorDash a lot. There's a million options that fit into my crazy keto diet ways. Also, it's a great way to support restaurants in these challenging times. Once again, download a DoorDash app and enter code Lex to get 5 bucks off and zero delivery fees and your first order of $15 or more. Finally, this shows presented by CashApp, the number one finance app in the App Store. I can truly say that they're an amazing company, one of the first sponsors, if not the first sponsor, to truly believe in me.

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an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Eugenia Cuida. Okay, before we talk about AI and the amazing work you're doing, let me ask you ridiculously, with both Russian. So, when we ask you, we romanticize Russian question, do you think human beings are alone, like fundamentally on a philosophical level? Like in our existence, when we, like, go through life,

do you think just the nature of our life is loneliness? Yes, so we have to read those two F-skid school as you probably know. In Russian? Yeah, I mean it's part of the your school program. So I guess if you read that then you sort of have to believe that. You're made to believe that you're fundamentally alone and that's how you live your life. How do you think about it? You have a lot of friends, but at the end of the day, do you have like a longing for connection with other people that's?

Maybe another way of asking it. Do you think that's ever fully satisfied? I think we are fundamentally alone. We're born alone. We're die alone, but I think we are fundamentally alone. We're born alone, we're with diallone, but I view my whole life as trying to get away from that, trying to not feel lonely. Again, we're talking about subjective way of feeling alone. It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any connections or you're actually isolated. You think it's a subjective thing, but like again, another absurd, measurement wise thing. How much loneliness do you think there is in the world? So like,

if you see loneliness as a condition, how much of it is there? Do you think? Like how, I guess, how many, you know, there's all kinds of studies and measures of how many people in the world feel alone, there's all these like measures of how many people are, you know, self-report, or just all these kinds of different measures, but in your own perspective, how big of a problem do you think it is? Size wise. Well, I'm actually fascinated by the topic of loneliness. I try to read about it as much as I can.

What really, and I think there's a paradox because loneliness is not a clinical disorder. It's not something that you can get yours, yours to pay for if you're struggling with that. Yet, it's actually proven and pretty tons of papers, tons of research around that. It is proven that it's correlated with earlier life expectancy, shorter lifespan. And it is in a way, like right now, what scientists would say that it's a little bit worse than VNOB, so not actually doing any physical activity in your life.

And just impact on your physiological health. Yeah. So it basically puts you, if you're constantly feeling lonely, your body responds like it's basically all the time under stress. So it's always in this alert state. And so it's really bad for you because it actually drops your immune system and gets your response to inflammation.

It's quite different. So all the cardiovascular diseases actually responds to viruses. So it's much easier to catch a virus. That's sad now that we're living in a pandemic and it's probably making us a lot more alone. And it's probably weakening the immune system, making us more susceptible to the virus. It's kind of sad. Yeah, the statistics are, the statistics are pretty horrible around that. So around 30% of all millennials report that they're feeling lonely constantly. 30. 30% and then it's much worse for Jan Z.

And then 20% of millennials say that they feel lonely and they also don't have any close friends. And then I think 25 or so and then 20% will say that they don't even have acquaintances. In the United States. That's in the United States. And I'm pretty sure that much worse everywhere else. I can do a K. I mean, it was widely like tweeted and posted when they were talking about a minister of loneliness that they wanted to point.

It's four out of 10. You people in the UK feel lonely. I think we don't. It's true of loneliness. I mean, that thing actually exists. So yeah, you, you, you will die sooner if you, if you are lonely. And again, that this is only when we're only talking about your perception of loneliness or feeling lonely. That is not objectively fully being fully socially isolated. However, the combination of being fully socially isolated, not having many connections and also feeling lonely,

that's pretty much a deadly combination. So strikes me bizarre or strange that this is a wide known fact. And then there's really no one working really on that because it's subclinical, it's not clinical, it's not something that you can will tell your doctor and get a treatment or something, yet it's killing us. Yeah, so there's a bunch of people trying to evaluate, like, try to measure the problem by looking at like how social media is affecting lowliness and all that kind of stuff. So it's like measurement. Like if you look at the field of psychology, they're trying to measure the problem. And not that many people actually, but some,

but you're basically saying how many people are trying to solve the problem. Like, how would you try to solve the problem of loneliness? Like, if you just stick to humans, I mean, or basically not just the humans, but the technology that connects us humans, do you think there's a hope for that technology to do the connection? Like are you on social media much? Unfortunately. Do you find yourself, like, again, if you sort of

introspect about how connected you feel to other human beings, how not alone you feel, do you think social media makes it better or worse? Maybe for you personally or in general. I think it's easier to look at some stats. And I mean, Gen Z seem to be generation C seems to be much lonelier than millennials in terms of how they report loneliness. They're definitely the most connected, you know, generation in the

world. I mean, I still remember life without without a iPhone without Facebook. They don't know that that ever existed. Or at least don't know how it was. So that tells me a little bit about the fact that that might be, you know, this hyperconnected world might actually make people feel lonely, lonely, I don't know exactly what the measurements are around that, but I would say, you know, in my personal experience, I think it does make you feel a lot lonely. Mostly, yeah, we're all super connected, but I think loneliness, the feeling of loneliness doesn't come from not having any social connections whatsoever. Again,

tons of people that are in long-term relationships experience, bouts of loneliness and continued loneliness. And it's more the question about the true connection, about actually being deeply seen, deeply understood. And in a way, it's also about your relationship with yourself. Like, in order to not feel lonely, you actually need to have a better relationship and feel more connected to yourself than this feeling actually starts to go away a little bit. and then you open up your self to actually meeting other people in a very special way, not just at a friend on Facebook kind of way. So just to briefly touch on it, I mean, do you think it's possible to form that kind of

connection with AI systems, more down line of some of your work. Do you think that's engineering was a possibility to alleviate loneliness is not with another human, but with an AI system? Well, I know that's that's the fact. That's what we're doing. And we see it and we measure that and we see how people start to feel less lonely talking to their virtual AI friend. So basically a chatbot at the basic level but could be more. Like do you have, I'm not even speaking sort of, uh, boss specifics, but do you have a hope, like if you look 50 years from now, do you have a hope that there's just like AI's that

are like optimized for, let me first start like right now, the way people perceive AI, which is recommender systems for Facebook and Twitter, social media, they see AI's basically destroying, first of all, the fabric of our civilization, but second of all, making us more more lonely. Do you see like a world where it's possible to just have AI systems floating about that like make our life less lonely? Yeah, make us happy.

Like are putting good things into the world in terms of our individual lives? Yeah, totally believe it. And that that's why I'm also working on that. I think we need to also make sure that what we're trying to optimize for, we're actually measuring. And it is an orthometric that we go and after and all of our product and all of our business models are optimized for that. Because you can talk, you know, a lot of products to talk about, you know, making you feel less lonely and making you feel more connected, they're not really measuring

that so they don't really know whether their users are actually feeling less lonely in the long run or feeling more connected in the long run. So I think it's really important to put your... To measure it. Yeah, to measure it. What's a good measurement of loneliness? Well, so that's something that I'm really interested in. How do you measure that people are feeling better or that they're feeling less lonely? With loneliness, there's a scale. There's a UCLA 20 and UCLA 3, a recently scale, which is basically a questionnaire that you fill out. And you can see whether in the long run, it's improving or not. And that does it capture the momentary feeling of loneliness? Does it look in like the past month?

Like, is it basically self-report? Does it try to sneak up on you? Try tricky to answer honestly or something like that? Well, what's, yeah, I'm not familiar with the question. It is just asking you a few questions like how often did you feel lonely or how often did you feel connected to other people in this last few couple of weeks? It's similar to the self-report questionnaires for depression, anxiety,

like beach Q9 and get seven. Of course, is any self-report questionnaires that's not necessarily very precise or very well measured. But still, if you take a big enough population, you get them through these questionnaires, you can see positive dynamic. And so you basically put people to questionnaires to see, like, is this thing, is what we're creating making people happier? like, is this thing, is our, is what we're creating making people happier? Yeah, we measure, so we measure two outcomes. One, short term, right after the conversation, we ask people whether this conversation made them feel better, worse or same. This, this metric right now is at 80%, so 80% of all our conversations make people feel better.

But I should have done the questionnaire with you. You feel a lot worse after we've done this conversation. That's actually fascinating. I should probably do it. But that's probably that. You should totally start from that. And aim to outperform your current state of the RAI system in these human conversations. So, okay, we'll get to your work with replica. But let me continue on the line of research questions.

So, you talked about deep connection of the humans, deep connection of the AI, meaningful connection. Let me ask about love. People make fun of me because I talk about love all the time. But what do you think a love is? Let me ask about love. People make fun of me because I talk about love all the time. But what do you think a love is like maybe in the context of a meaningful connection with somebody else? Do you draw a distinction between love, like friendship and Facebook friends?

Or is it a graduate? No. It's all the same. No, like is it just a gradual thing or is there something fundamental about us humans that seek like a really deep connection? Well, they're not like human beings and what is that? What is love? Eugenia. I'm gonna just end you asking these questions and seeing your struggle. I know. Thanks.

Well, the way I see it, specifically the way it relates to our work and the way it inspired our work in replica, I think one of the biggest and the most precious gifts we can give to each other now in 2020 as humans is this gift of deep empathetic understanding, the feeling of being deeply seen. Like what does that mean? Like that you exist, like somebody acknowledging that. Somebody seeing you for who you actually are. And that you exist, like somebody acknowledging that somebody seeing you for who you actually are.

And that's extremely, extremely rare. I think that is that combined with unconditional positive regard, belief and trust that you internally are always inclined for positive growth and believing you in this way, letting you be a separate person at the same time. And this deep empathetic understanding, for me, that's the combination that really creates something special, something that people, when they feel it once, they will always long for it again. And something that starts huge fundamental changes in people. When we see the someone's accept starts so deeply,

we start to accept ourselves and the paradox is, that's when big changes start happening, big fundamental changes in people start happening. So I think that is the ultimate therapeutic relationship that is, and that might be in some way a definition of love. So acknowledging that there's a separate person and accepting you for who you are, now, and slightly, and you mentioned therapeutic,

that sounds very like a very healthy view of love, but is there also like a, like, you know, if we look at heartbreak and, you know, most love songs are probably about heartbreak, right? Is that like the mystery, the tension, the danger, the fear of loss, you know, all of that? What people might see in the negative light is like games or whatever,

but just the dance of human interaction, fear of loss, and fear of like, you said like once you feel it once, you long for it again, but you also once you feel it once, you might, for many people, they've lost it. So they fear losing it. They feel lost. So it's that part of it. Like you're speaking like beautifully about like the positive things, but is it important to be able to be afraid of losing it from an engineering perspective? And it's a huge part of it.

And unfortunately, we all, you know, face it at some points in our lives. I mean, I did. You want to go into details? Did you get your heart broken? Sure. Was a minus pretty straight, my source pretty straight for it. There, I did have a friend that was, you know, that at some point in my 20s became really, really close to me and we became really close friends. I grew up pretty lonely, so in many ways when I'm building, you know, these AI friends have to think about myself when I was 17, writing horrible poetry and, you know, in my dial-up, bottom, at home, and, you know, and that was the feeling that I grew up with.

I left alone for a long time and it was a teenager. Where did you go? In Moscow and the outskirts of Moscow. So I just skateboarded during the day and come back home and, you know, connect to the internet. And write poetry. And then write horrible poetry. And-

Was it love poems? All sorts of poems. Obviously love poems. What other poetry can you write when you're 17? Could be political or something, but yeah. But that was, you know, that was kind of my fiat, like deeply influenced by Joseph Brotsky and like all sorts of poets that every 17 year old will,

we'll be looking, you know, looking at and reading. But yeah, that was my, these were my teenage years and I just never had a person that I thought would, you know, take me as it is, would accept me the way I am. And I just thought, you know, working and just doing my thing and being angry at the world and being a reporter, I was investigating a reporter working on the cover and writing about people was my way to connect with, you know, with others. I was deeply curious about everyone else. And I thought that, you know, if I go out there and write their stories, that means I'm more connected.

This is what this podcast is about, by the way. I'm desperate, I'm seeking connection. I'm just kidding, or am I, I don't know. So, wait, reporter, how did that make you feel more connected? I mean, you're still fundamentally pretty alone. But you're always with other people, you know, you're always thinking about what other place can I infiltrate, what other community can I write about? What other phenomenon can I explore?

And you sort of like a trickster, you know, and like, and a mythological character like creature that's just jumping between all sorts of different worlds and feel and feel sort of okay with in all of them. So that was my dream job, by the way. That was like totally what I would have been doing if Russia was a different place. And I've a little bit on the cover, so like you weren't, you were trying to, like you said, mythological creature trying to infiltrate. So try to be a part of the world. What are we talking about? What kind of things did you enjoy writing about? I'd go work at a strip club or go. of things, did you enjoy writing about? I'd go work at a strip club or go.

Awesome. OK. Well, I'd go work at a restaurant or just go write about certain phenomena or phenomena or people in the city. And what, sorry, to keep interrupting. I'm the worst conversationalist. What stage of Russia is this?

What is this pre-Putin, post-Putin? What was Russia like? Pre-Putin is really long ago. This is Putin era. That's the beginning of 2000s and 2010, 2007, 8, 9, 10. What were strip clubs like in Russia and restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that early Russia that you were covering? In those early 2000s, there was still a lot of hope. There were still tons of hope that we're sort of becoming this westernized society. The restaurants were opening,

where we're really looking at, we're trying to copy a lot of things from the US, from Europe, bringing all these things. And very enthusiastic about that. There was a lot of, you know, stuff going on. There was a lot of hope and dream for this, you know, new Moscow that would be similar to, I guess, New York. I mean, to give you an idea and year 2000 was the year one. We had two movie theaters in Moscow. And there was one first coffee house that opened. And it was like really big deal. By 2010, there were all sorts of things everywhere. Almost like a chain, like a Starbucks type of coffee house or like you mean. Oh yeah, like a Starbucks.

I mean, I remember we were reporting on like, we were writing about the opening of Starbucks, I think in 2007, that was one of the biggest things that happened in Moscow back in the time. Like that was worthy of a magazine cover. And that was definitely the biggest talk of the time. Yeah, when was McDonald's? Because I was still in Russia when McDonald's opened. That was in the 90s. I mean, yeah, I remember that very well. Those were long, long lines. I think it was 1993 or 4.

I remember. Do you like the lettering downs at that time? Did you do that? I mean, that was a luxurious outing. That was definitely not something you do every day. And also the line was at least three hours. So if you're going to McDonald's, that is not fast food. That is like at least three hours in line. And then no one is trying to be fast after that. Everyone is like trying to enjoy as much as possible. What's your memory of that? Oh, it was insane.

How do I feel? Extremely positive. It's a small strawberry milkshake and the hamburger and small fries and my mom's there. And sometimes I'll just, because I was really little, they'll just let me run up the cushion here and cut the line, which is, you cannot really do that in Russia or. So, like, for a lot of people,

like a lot of those experiences might seem not very fulfilling, you know, like it's on the verge of poverty, I suppose, but do you remember all that time fondly? Like, because I do, like the first time I drink, you know, coke, you know, all that stuff, right? And just, yeah, the connection with other human beings in Russia, I remember, I remember really positively.

Like how do you remember, well, the 90s and then the Russia you were covering, just the human connections you had with people and the experiences? Well, my parents were both both physicists. My grandparents were both, well, my grandfather was a nuclear physicist, a professor at the university. My dad works at Chernobyl when I was born in Chernobyl analyzing kind of the Everything after the explosion and then I remember that and they were so they were making sort of enough money in the Soviet Union

So they were not you know extremely poor or anything. It was pretty prestigious to be a professor the dean and the university. And then I remember my grandfather started making $100 a month after, you know, in the 90s. So then I remember we started, our main line of work would be to go to our little tiny country house, get a lot of apples there from apple trees, bring them back to the city and sell them in the street. So me and my nuclear physicist grandfather were just standing there and he selling those apples the whole day because that would make you more money than working at the university.

And then he'll just tell me, try to teach me something about planets and whatever, the particles and stuff. And, you know, I'm not smart at all, so I could never understand anything. But I was interested as, you know, journalist kind of type interested. But that was my membrane. You know, I'm happy that I wasn't, I somehow got spared that I was probably too young to remember any of the traumatic stuff. So the only thing I really remember had this bootleg, that was very traumatic, had this bootleg Nintendo, which was called Dandy in Russia. So in 1993, there was nothing to eat. Like, even if you had any money, you would go to the store and there was no food. I don't know if you remember that. And our friend had a restaurant like a government, Harf government owned something restaurant.

So they always had supplies. So he exchanged a big bag of wheat for this Nintendo. The book like Nintendo. And that I remember very faulty because I think it was nine or something like that and we're seven. We just got it and I was playing it and there was this, you know, Dandy TV show. Yeah. So it's a dramatic and positive sense, you mean, like a definitive.

Well, they took it away and gave me a bag of wheat instead and I cried like my eyes out for days and days. Oh, I thought of the other direction. Oh, no. And then, you know, as a, and my dad said said, what can I like exchange it back in a little bit? So you keep the little gun, you know, the one that you should deduct with some like okay, I'm keeping the gun So sometimes it's gonna come back, but then they exchanged the gun as well for some sugar or something I was so pissed. I was like I didn't want to eat for days after that

I'm like I don't want you to do my Nintendo back That was extremely traumatic But you know, I don't want you to move in my Nintendo. That was extremely traumatic. But I was happy that that was my only traumatic experience. My dad had to actually go to Chernobyl with a bunch of 20 or all. He was 20 when he went to Chernobyl. And that was right after the exposure. No one knew anything. The whole crew, he went with all of them are dead now. I think there was this one guy that was still alive for the S dead now. I think there was this one guy still that was still alive for This last few years. I think he died a few years ago now

My dad somehow luckily got back earlier than everyone else But just the fact that that was the and I was always like well, how did they send you? I was only I was just born, you know, you had a newborn talk about paternity leave They're like oh, but that's who they took, because they didn't know whether you would be able to have kids when you come back. So they took the ones with kids. So he came with some guys went to, and I'm just thinking of me, when I was 20, I was so sheltered from any problems with seven life and then my dad, the 21st birthday at the reactor. You like work three hours a day, you sleep the rest. I played with a lot of toys from Chernobyl.

What do your memories of Chernobyl in general? Bigger context, because of that HBO show, the world's attention turned to it once again. Like, what are your thoughts about your novel? The Russia screw that one up. Like, you know, there's probably a lot of lessons about our modern times with data about coronavirus and all that kind of stuff. It seems like there's a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of people kind of trying to hide whether they screwed something up or not, as it's very understandable, it's very human, very wrong probably, but obviously Russia is probably trying to hide that they've screwed things up.

Like, what are your thoughts about that time, personal and general? I mean, I was born when the explosion happened. So actually a few months after. So of course, I don't remember anything apart from the fact that my dad would bring me tiny toys plus like plastic things that would just go crazy. Hey, why are when you, you know, put the gager thing to it. Because my mom was like just nuclear about that. I was like, what are you bringing me? I'll do that. She was nuclear. Very nice. Absolutely. Well done. Well, but yeah, but the TV show was just phenomenal. I mean, it's definitely, first of all, it's an incredible how that was made not by the Russians

but someone else, but capturing so well, everything about our country. It felt a lot more genuine than most of the movies in TV shows that are made now in Russia just so much more genuine. And most of my friends in Russia were just incomplete all about the show, but I think the... I'll go to a job they did my off phenomenal. But also the apartments, there's something. Yeah, the set design. I mean, Russian can't do that.

We, you know, but you, you see everything and it's like, wow, that's exactly how it was. So I don't know that show. I don't know what to think about that because it's British accents, British actors of a person. I forgot who created this show. I remember reading about him and he doesn't even feel like there's no Russia in this history. No, he did like super bad or something like I wish. Or like, I don't know. Whatever that thing about the bachelor party in Vegas, number four and five or something were the ones that he worked. Yeah, but so he

made me feel really sad for some reason that If a person obviously a genius could go in and just study and just be Extreme attention to detail. They can do a good job. It made me think like Why don't other people do a good job with this? Like about Russia, like there's so little about Russia. There's so few good films about the Russian side of World War II. I mean, there's so much interesting evil and not and beautiful moments in the history of the 20th century in Russia.

It feels like there's not many good films on from the Russians. You would expect something from the Russians. Well, they keep making these propaganda movies now. Oh, no. Unfortunately, but I know Chernobyl was such a perfect, I think capturing really well. It's not about like even the set design, which was phenomenal, but just capturing all the problems that exist now with the country and like focusing on the right things. Like if you build the whole country on a lie, that's what's going to happen. And that's just this very simple kind of thing. Yeah. And did you have your dad talked about it?

Do you like his thoughts on the experience? He never talks. This kind of Russian woman, that just my husband, who's American, and he asked him a few times, like, you know, Igor, how did you? But why did you say yes? Or like, what did you decide to go? You could have said no, not go to Chernobyl. Why would like a person like that's what you do. You cannot say no. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like a Russian way. It's the Russian way.

They'll talk that much. No. They're downstairs and up sides for that. Yeah, that's the truth. Okay, so back to post Putin Russia. Or maybe we skipped a few steps along the way, but you were trying to do to be a journalist in that time. What was Russia like at that time? Post, you said 2007 Starbucks type of thing. What else was Russia like then? I think there was just hope. There was this big hope that we're going to be friends with the United States and we're going to be friends with Europe and we're just going to be also a country like those with, you know, bike lanes and parks and everything's going to be urbanized. Again, we're talking about 90s where like people would be shot in the street and it was, I sort of have a fond memory of going into

a movie theater and, you know, coming out of it up to the movie and the guy that I saw on the stairs was like, like, neither shot. Again, It was like a thing in the 90s. That would be happening. People were getting shot here and there. Just violence. It tons of violence, tons of, you know, just basically mafia mobs in the streets. And then the 2000s were like, you know,

things just got cleaned up, oil went up. And the country started getting a little bit richer. The 90s were so grim mostly because the economy was in shambles, and oil prices were not high, so the country didn't have anything. We defaulted in 1998, and the money kept jumping back and forth. First there were millions of rubbles, then it got to thousands, then it was one rubble with something, then again to millions. It was like crazy town. And then the 2000s were just these years of stability in a way and the country getting a little bit richer because of, you know, again,

oil and gas. And we were starting to, we started to look at specifically in Moscow and some people's work to look at other cities in Europe and New York and US and Trying to do the same in our like small Kind of cities towns there. What was what were your thoughts of Putin at the time? Well, in the beginning he was really positive everyone was very, you know positive about Putin. He was young It's very energetic. He also immediately the shirtless

somewhat compared to well, that was not like way before the shortlist era. The shortlist era. Okay, so he didn't start out in shortlist. One of the shortlist areas is the propaganda of riding horse fishing. 2010, 2012. Yeah, that's my favorite. You know, like people talk about the favorite beetles, like the, that's my favorite booten. Is this shirtless booten?

I remember very, very clearly in 1996 where Americans really helped Russia with elections, and Yeltsin got reelected, thankfully so. Because there was a huge threat that actually the communist will get back to power. They were a lot more popular. And then a lot of American experts, political experts, and campaign experts descended on Moscow and helped Yeltsin actually get the presidency, the second term for the presidency,

but Yeltsin was not feeling great by the end of his second term. He was alcoholic, he was really old, he was falling off the stages where he was talking. So people were looking for fresh face, for someone who's going to continue Yeltsin's for a fresh face, for someone who's gonna continue the essence work, but who's gonna be a lot more energetic and a lot more active young, efficient maybe. So that's what we all saw in Pudent back in the day. I'd say that everyone, absolutely everyone in Russian, early 2000s who was not a communist would be,

yeah, Pudent is great, we have a lot of hopes for him. What are your thoughts and I promise we'll get back to, uh, first of all, your love story, and second of all, AI, well, what are your thoughts about communism? The 20th century, I apologize, I'm reading the rise and falls, third right? Oh my God. So I'm like like really steeped into like World War II and Stalin and Hitler and just these dramatic personalities that brought so much evil to the world.

But it's also interesting to politically think about these different systems and what they've led to. And Russia is one of the sort of beacons of communism in the 20th century. What are your thoughts about communism? Having experienced it as a political system. I mean, I have only experienced it a little bit, but mostly through stories and through, you know, seeing my parents and my grandparents who lived through that, it was horrible. It was just plain horrible. It was just awful. You think it's there's something, I mean, it sounds nice on paper. There's, so like the drawbacks of capitalism is that, you know, eventually, it's a point of like a slippery slope. Eventually, it creates, you know, the rich get richer, it creates a disparity, like inequality of

wealth inequality. If like, you know, I guess it's hypothetical at this point, but eventually capitalism leads to humongous inequality and that some people argue that that's a source of unhappiness. Is it's not like absolute wealth of people, it's the fact that there's a lot of people much richer than you. There's a feeling of like, that's where unhappiness can come from. So the idea of communism or these sort of Marxism is Is is not allowing that kind of slippery slope But then you see the actual implementations of it and stuff seems to be seems to go wrong very badly

What do you think that is? Why does it go wrong? What is it about human nature? If you look at Chernobyl, you know, those kinds of bureaucracies that were constructed, is there something like, do you think about this much of like why goes wrong? Well, there's no one was really like, it's not that everyone was equal. Obviously, the government and everyone close to that were the bosses, so it's not fully, I guess, this dream of equal life. So, then I guess the situation that we had in the Soviet Union, it was more subentral for really poor people without any way to make any significant fortune or build anything living under constant surveillance. Surveillance from other

people, like you can't even do anything that's not fully approved by the dictatorship, basically, otherwise, your neighbor will write a letter and you'll go to jail. Absolute absence of actual law. The constant state of fear. You didn't own anything, you didn't, you know, the, you couldn't go travel, you couldn't read anything. Western or you could make a career really unless you're working the military complex, which is why most of the scientists were so well regarded. I come from both my dad and my mom come from families of scientists and they were really well regarded as you as you know, obviously. Is this the state wanted?

I mean, because there's a lot of value to them being well-regarded. Because they were developing things that could be used in the military. So that was very important. That was the main investment. But it was miserable. That's why a lot of Russians now live in the state of constant PTSD. That's why we want to buy, buy, buy, buy. And definitely if it's as soon as we have the opportunity, you know, we just got to it finally that we can, you know, own things, you know, I remember the time that we got our first

yogurts, and that was the biggest deal in the world. It was already in the 90s, by the way. What was your like favorite food? What was like, well, like this is possible. Oh, fruit, because we only had apples, bananas, and whatever, and you know, whatever, watermelons, whatever, you know, people would grow in the Soviet Union. So there were no pine apples or papaya or mango. Like you've never seen those fruit things. Like those were so ridiculously good. And obviously you could not get any like

strawberries and winter or anything that's not, you know, seasonal. So that was a really big deal. Seeing all these fruit things. Yeah, me too, actually. I don't know. I think I have a, like, I don't think I have any too many demons or like addictions or so on, but I think I've developed an unhealthy relationship with fruit. I still struggle with. Oh, you can get any type of fruit, right? You can get like, also these weird fruit, fruits like dragon fruit or something or all kinds of like different types of peaches. Like cherries were killer for me. I know, I know you say like we had bananas and so on, but

I don't remember having the kind of banana. Like when I first came to this country, the amount of banana, I like literally got fat on bananas. Like the amount, oh yeah, for sure. Delicious and like cherries, the kind, like just the quality of the food. I was like, this is capitalism. That's pretty delicious. Delicious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny. Yeah, like it's it's funny to read.

I don't know what to think of it of um, it's funny to think how an idea that's just written on paper when carried out amongst millions of people how they get actually, when it becomes reality what it actually looks like. Sorry, but the, been studying Hitler a lot recently and going through Mein Kampf, he pretty much wrote out of Mein Kampf, everything he was going to do. Unfortunately, most leaders including Stalin didn't read it, but it's kind of terrifying and I don't know. And amazing in some sense that you can have some words on paper and they can be brought

to life and they can either inspire the world or they can destroy the world. And yeah, there's a lot of lessons to study in history that I think people don't study enough now. And one of the things I'm hoping with, I'm practicing Russian a little bit, I'm hoping to sort of find, we discover the beauty and the terror of Russian history Through this stupid podcast by talking to a few people So anyway, I just feel like so much was forgotten. I so much was forgotten I'll probably I want to try to convince myself to

You're super busy and super important person. Well, I'm. I want to try to be a friend to try to become a better Russian, because I feel like I'm a shitty Russian. No, that busy. I can totally be your Russian Sherpa. Sure. Yeah, but love. You're talking about your early days of being a little bit alone and finding a connection with the world through being a journalist. What did love come into that?

I guess finding for the first time some friends, simple stories, some friends that all of a sudden we, I guess we were the same, you know, the same, at the same place with our lives. We're 25, 26, I guess, and somehow remember, and we just got really close and somehow remember this one day, we're, it's one day in, you know, in summer that we just stayed out, outdoor the whole night and just talked and for some unknown reason, it just out door the whole night and just talked. And for some unknown reason, I just felt for the first time that someone could see me for who I am.

And I just felt extremely, like, extremely good. And we fell asleep outside and just talking. And it was raining, it was beautiful, sunrise. And it's really cheesy. But at the same time, we just became friends in a way that I've never been friends with anyone else before. And I do remember that before and after that, you sort of have this unconditional family sort of, and it gives you tons of power.

It just gives you this tremendous power to do things in your life and to change positively on many different levels. Power because you could be yourself. At least you know that somewhere you can be just yourself. If you don't need to pretend you don't need to be great at work or tell some story or sell yourself and somewhere and other. And so it became this really close friends. In a way, I started a company because he had a startup and I felt like I kind of want to start it. I felt really cool.

I don't know what I'm going to do, but I felt like I need to start up. Okay. So that pulled you in to the start of world. Yeah, and then this closest friend of mine died. We actually moved here to San Francisco together and then we went back for a visa to Moscow and we lived together with roommates and we came back and he got hit by a car right in front of Cromlin on a, you know, next to the river and died the same day. This is the Roman hospital.

This is the Roman. So, and you have moved to America at that point? At that point I was living. What about him? What about Roman? Him too. He actually moved first. I was always sort of trying to do what he was doing. So I didn't like that he was already here.

And I was still, you know, in Moscow, and we weren't hanging out together all the time. So what's the end San Francisco? Yeah. We were roommates. So he just visited Moscow for, we went back for, for our visas. We had to get us tamp in our passport for our work visas. And the embassy was taking a little longer,

so we stayed there for a couple of weeks. What happened? How did he die? He was crossing his street, and the car was going really fast and way over the speed limit, and just didn't stop on the pedestrian cross on the zebra and just run over him. What was this? It was in 2015 on 28th of November.

So it was a long ago now. But at the time, you know, I was 29. So for me, it was the first kind of meaningful death in my life. You know, both sets of, I had both sets of grandparents at the time. I didn't see anyone so close die and death sort of existed, but as a concept, but definitely not as something that would be happening to us anytime soon.

And specifically our friends, because we were, you know, we're still in our 20s or early early 30s and it still felt like the whole life is You know you could still dream about ridiculous things So that was it was just really really abrupt I'd say What did feel like to lose them, like that feeling of loss? You talked about the feeling of love having power. What is the feeling of loss?

Feel like. Well, in Buddhism, there's this concept of samaya where something really, like, huge happens and then you can see very clearly. I think that was it like basically something changed so much in such a short period of time that I could just see really clearly what matter or what not. Well, I definitely saw that whatever I was doing at work

didn't matter at all in some of the things. And it was just this big realization what this very, very clear vision of what life's about. You still miss him today? Yeah, for sure. For sure. It was just this constant. I think it was, he was really important for me and for our friends, for many different reasons. And I think it was, he was really important for me and for our friends, for many different reasons. And I think one of them, they would just say, good bye to him, but we sort of set good

bye to our youth in a way. It was like the end of an era and so many different levels. The end of Moscow is when you add the end of, you know, us living through our 20s and kind of dreaming about the future. Do you remember like last several conversations? Is there moments with him that stick out that look kind of haunt you? And you're just when you think about him? Yeah well his last year here in San Francisco was pretty depressed for it. As he started, it was not going really anywhere. And he wanted to do something else.

He wanted to build. He played with toy, played with a bunch of ideas, but the last one he had was around building a startup around death. So having he applied to a iconinator with a video that you know, I had on my computer and it was all about, you know, disrupting death, thinking about new symmetries more biologically, like things that could be better biologically for humans and at the same time having those digital avatars, this kind of AI avatars that was store all the memory about a person that he could interact with.

Well, here was this 2015. Well, right before that, his death, there was like a couple of months before that, he recorded that video. And so I found out my computer when there's a now living room. He never got in, but he was thinking about a lot somehow. Does it have the digital avatar idea? Yeah. That's so interesting.

Well, he just says, well, that's in his head. The pitch has this idea and he talks about like I want to rethink how people grieve and how people talk about death. Well, I was interested in this. Is, is it, maybe someone who's depressed, yeah, it's like a natural inclined thinking about that. But I just felt, you know, this year in San Francisco, we just had so much. I was going through hard time. He was going through hard time and we were definitely, I was trying to make him,

just happy. Some of us making him feel better. And it felt like, you know, this, I don't know, I just felt like I was trying to make him just happy. I was making him feel better. And it felt like, you know, this, I don't know, I just felt like I was taking care of all of him a lot. And he almost started to feel better. And then that happened. And I don't know, I just felt, I just felt lonely again, I guess.

And that was, you know, coming back to San Francisco in December or helped, you, or helped organize the funeral, helped his parents. And I came back here and was a really lonely apartment, a bunch of his clothes everywhere, and Christmas time. And I remember I had a board meeting with my investors, and I just couldn't talk about like, I had to pretend everything's okay and you know just working on this company Yeah, it was wrote definitely very Very tough tough time Do you think about your

own mortality you said You know where young the The possibility of doing all kinds of crazy things is still out there, it's still out before us, but it can end any moment. Do you think about your own ending at any moment? Unfortunately, I think about way too much. It's somehow after Roman, like every year after that, I started losing people that I really

love. I lost my grandfather the next year. The person who would explain to me what the universe is made of. Even like the new world. What are you selling apples? Well selling apples and then I lost another close friend of mine. It just made me very scared. I have tons of fear about death. That's what makes me not fall asleep oftentimes and just go in loops and, um, and then as my therapist, you know, recommended me, I opened up, uh, some nice calming images with the voice over.

And it calms me down. Oh, first sleep. Yeah, I'm really scared of death. This is a big, I definitely have tons of, I guess, some pretty big trauma about it and still working through. There's a philosopher, Ernest Becker, who wrote a book, The Nile of Death. I'm not sure if you're familiar with any of those folks. There's a in psychology a whole field called terror management theory. She'll in who's just in the podcast you wrote the book.

He was the we talked for four hours about death. It's right. A few of death. But his his whole idea is that on his backcker, I think I find this idea really compelling, is that everything human beings have created, like our whole motivation in life, is to create, like, escape death. It's to try to construct an illusion, to construct an illusion that we're somehow immortal. So everything around us, this room, your start-up, your dreams, all everything you do is a kind of creation of a brain unlike any other mammal or species is able to be cognizant of the fact

that it ends for us. I think, so there's the question of the meaning of life that you look at what drives us humans. And when I read Ernest Becker that I highly recommend people read is the first time I This scene it felt like this is the right thing at the core Sheldon's work is called warm at the core So he's saying it's I think it's William James. He's quoting or whoever

Is like the the thing what is it the core of it all? Sure, there's like love, you know, Jesus might talk about like love, is it the core of everything? I don't, you know, that's the open question. What's it, you know, it's turtles, turtles, but it can't be turtles all the way down. What's it, what's it at the bottom? And Ernest Becker says the fear of death. And the way, in fact, because you said therapists

and calming images, his whole idea is, we wanna bring that fear of death as close as possible to the surface. Because it's, and like meditate on that, and use the clarity of vision that provides to live a more fulfilling life, to live a more honest life, to discover, you know, there's something about, you know, being cognizant of the finiteness of it all that might result in the most fulfilling life.

So that's the that's the dual of what you're saying, because you kind of said it's like, I unfortunately think about it too much. It's a question whether it's good to think about it. Because I've, I'm again, I talk about way too much about love and probably death. And when I ask people, friends, which is why I probably don't have many friends, are you afraid of death? I think most people say they're not.

They're not. What they say, they're afraid. It's almost like they see death as this kind of like paper deadline or something, and they're afraid not to finish the paper before the paper. Like, I'm afraid not to finish the goals I have, but it feels like they're not actually realizing that this thing ends, like really realizing, like really thinking as Nietzsche and all these philosophers, like thinking deeply about it.

you share in all these philosophy, like thinking deeply about it. Like the very thing that, you know, like when you think deeply about something, you can just, you can realize that you haven't actually thought about it. And yeah, and when I think about death, it's like, it can be, it's terrifying. It feels like stepping outside into the cold, where it's freezing. And then I have to like hurry back inside or it's warm. But like, I think there's something valuable about stepping out there into the freezing cold. Definitely. When I talk to my mentor about it, he always tells me, well, what dies? There's nothing there that can die. But I guess that requires.

Well, in Buddhism, one of the concepts that are really hard to grasp and that people spend all their lives meditating on would be anata, which is the concept of not self. And kind of thinking that, you know, if you're not your thoughts, which you're obviously not your thoughts, because you're going to observe them and not your emotions and not your body, then what is this? And if you go really far, then finally you see that there's not self, there's this concept of not self. So once you get there, how can that actually die? What is dying?

Right, you're just a bunch of molecules, star dust. But that is very, you know, very advanced spiritual work for me. Exactly. I'm definitely just, definitely not. Oh my God. No, I have, I think it's very, very useful. It's just the fact that maybe being so afraid is not useful. And mine is more, I'm just terrified. Like, it really makes me a person level on a personal level. I'm terrified. How do you overcome that?

I don't. I'm still trying to have pleasant images. Well, pleasant images get me to sleep and then during the day I can distract myself with other things like talking to you. I'm glad we're both doing the same exact thing. Okay. Good. I'm glad we're both doing the same exact thing. Okay, good. Is there other, like, is there moments since you've lost Roman that you had like moments of, like bliss and like that you've forgotten that that you have achieved that Buddhist level of,

like what can possibly die, I'm part, like losing yourself in the moment, in the ticking time of this universe. And you're just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it. Well, that goes hand in hand. I remember, I think a day or two after he had died, we went to finally get his passport out of the embassy

and we're driving around Moscow and it was, you know, December, which is usually, there's never a son in Moscow in December. And somehow it was an extremely sunny day. And we were driving with a close friend. And I remember feeling, for the first time, maybe this just moment of incredible clarity and somehow happiness, not like happy happiness, but happiness. And it's just feeling that, you know, I know what the universe is sort of about, whether it's good or bad. And it wasn't a sad feeling.

It was probably the most beautiful feeling they could ever achieve. And you can only get it when something, oftentimes when something traumatic like that happens. But also if you just, you really spend a lot of time meditating, looking at the nature, doing something that really gets you there. But once you're there, I think when you sum it amount in a really hard amount and you inevitably get there, it's just a way to get to the state. But once you're on this, in this state, you can do really big things, I think. Yeah. Soxit doesn't last forever. So Bukowski talked about, like, love is a fog.

Like, it's when you wake up in the morning, it's there, but it eventually dissipates. It's really sad. Nothing lasts forever. But I definitely like doing this push up and running thing. There's moments at a couple moments. Like I'm not a cryer. I don't cry. But there's moments where I was like facedown on the carpet.

Like what tears in my eyes is interesting. And then that like complete like, there's a lot of demons. I've got demons had to face them. Funny how running makes you face your demons, but At the same time the flip side of that there's a few moments where I was in bliss and All of it alone which is funny. Yeah, it's beautiful Like that, but definitely pushing yourself physically one of it for sure. Yeah, yeah But definitely pushing yourself physically, one of it for sure. Yeah, it's, yeah.

Like you said, I mean, you're speaking as a metaphor of mon Everest, but it also works like literally, I think, physical endeavor somehow. Yeah, there's something. I mean, warm monkeys, apes, whatever, physical, there's a physical thing to it. But there's something to this pushing yourself physical physically but alone. That happens when you're doing like things like you do or straining it's like workouts or you know rolling it across the Atlantic or like marathons. That's why I love watching marathons and you know it's so boring but you can see them getting there.

So the other thing, I don't know if you know there's a guy named David Goggins. He's basically, so he's been either emailing the phone with me every day through this. I haven't been exactly alone, but he's kind of, he's the devil on the devil's shoulder. So he's like the worst possible human being in terms of giving you a like he has through everything I've been doing.

He's been doubling everything I do. So he's insane. He's a this Navy SEAL person. He's wrote this book, can't hurt me. He's basically one of theAL person. He wrote this book, Can't Hurt Me. He's basically one of the toughest human beings at Earth. He ran all these crazy awesome marathons in the desert. He said the world record number of pull-ups. He just does everything where's like,

he, like, how can I suffer today? He figures that out and does it. Yeah, that, whatever that is, that process of self-discovery is really important. I actually had to turn myself off from the internet mostly because I started this like workout thing like a happy go getter with my like headband and like just like because a lot of people were like inspired and they're like, yeah, we're going to exercise with you. And I was, yeah, great. You know, but then like, I realized that this, this journey can't be done together with others. This has to be done alone. So out of the moments of love, out of the moments of loss? Can we talk about your journey of finding, I think, an incredible idea, an incredible company,

an incredible system in replica? How did that come to be? So yes, I was a journalist, and then I went to business school for a couple of years to just see if I can maybe switch gears and do something else with 23. And then I went to business school for a couple of years to just see if I can maybe switch gears and do something else with 23. And then I came back and started working for a businessman in Russia who built the first 4G network in our country and was very visionary and asked me whether I want to do fun stuff together. And we worked on a bank. The idea was to build a bank on top of a telco.

So that was 2011 or 12. And a lot of telecommunication company, mobile network operators didn't really know what to do next in terms of new products, new revenue. And this big idea was that you put a bank on top and then all works out. Basically a prepaid account becomes your bank account and you can use it as your bank. So a third of a country wakes up as your bank client. But we couldn't quite figure out what would be the main interface

to interact with the bank. The problem was that most people didn't have smart phones back in the time. In Russia, the penetration of smartphones was low. People didn't use mobile banking or online banking or their computers. So we figured out that SMS would be the best way, because that would work on feature phones.

But that required some chatbot technology, which I don't know anything about, obviously. So I started looking into it and saw that there's nothing really. Well, there was just nothing really. So the ideas through SMS be able to interact with a bank account? Yeah, and then we thought, well, since you're talking

to a bank account, why can't this, can't we use more of, you know, some behavioral ideas and why can't this banking chatbot be nice to you and really talk to you sort as a friend this way you develop more connection to it, retention is higher, people don't turn. And so I went to very depressing Russian cities to test it out. I remember three different towns to interview potential users. People used it for a little bit. And I went to talk to them. And we were part. Pretty poor towns. Very poor towns. Mostly towns that were factories monotowns, they were building something and then the factory

went away and there was just a bunch of very poor people. Um, and then we went to a couple that weren't as dramatic, but still the one I remember really fondly was this woman that worked at a glass factory and she talked to a chatbot, um, and she was talking about it and she started crying during the interview because she said no one really cares for me that much. And so to be clear, that was my only endeavor and programming that chat box. It was really simple. It was literally just a few, if this, then that rules and it was incredibly simplistic. And still that made her emotional.

She said, you don't have my mom and my husband and I don't have anymore really in my life. And that was very sad, but at the same time I felt and we had more interviews in a similar vein. And what I thought in the moment was like, well, it's not that the technology is ready, because definitely in 2012, technology was not ready for that, but humans are ready, unfortunately. So this project would not be about, like tech capabilities would be more about human vulnerabilities, but there's something so powerful around about conversational AI that I saw then that I thought it was definitely worth putting in a lot of effort into.

So in the end of the day we saw the banking project, but then Boss was also my mentor and really, really close friend. He told me, hey, I think there's something in it and you should just go work on it. I was like, well, what product? I don't know what I'm building. He's like, you'll figure it out. And, you know, looking back at this, there was a horrible idea to work on something without known what it was, which is maybe the reason why it took us so long. But we just decided to work on the conversational tech to see what it you know there were no chatbot

Constructors or programs or anything that will allow you to actually build one at the time That was the era of by the way Google Glass, which is why you know some of the investors like see the investor we talked with were like Oh, you should totally build it for Google Glass if not we, we're not. I don't think that's interesting. Did you bite on that idea? No. Okay. Because I wanted to do text first, because I'm a journalist, so I was fascinated by just texting.

So you thought, so the emotional, that interaction that the woman had, like, do you think you could feel emotion from just text? Yeah, I saw something in just this pure texting and I also thought that we should first start building for people who really need it versus people who have Google Glass. If you know what I mean, and I felt like the early adopters of Google Glass might not be overlapping with people who are really lonely and might need someone to talk to. But then we really just focused on the tech itself. We just thought,

what if we just, you know, we didn't have a product idea in the moment? And we felt, what if we just look into building the best conversational constructors, so to say. We used the best tech available at the time. And that was before the first paper about deep learning applied to dialogues, which happened in 2015, in August 2015, which Google published. Did you follow the work of Love Nuprise and like all the sort of non-machine learning chatbots? Yeah, but really struck me was that, and surprise, and all the sort of non-machine learning chatbots. It would really struck me was that there was a lot of talk about machine learning and deep learning, like big data was a really big thing. Everyone was saying business was big data. 2012, the biggest gaggle competitions were important, but that was really the kind of upheaval.

People started talking about machine learning a lot. But it was only about images or something else. And it was never about conversation. As soon as I looked into the conversational tech, it was all about something really weird and very outdated and very marginal and felt very hobbyist. It was all about Lordbinder Price, which was one by a guy who built a chatbot to talk like at a Ukrainian teenager. It was just a gimmick. And somehow people picked up those gimmicks. And then, you know, the most famous chatbot at the time was Eliza from 1980, which was really bizarre, or a smarter child on aim.

The funny thing is it felt at the time not to be that popular and it still doesn't seem to be that popular Like people talk about the touring test People like talking about it philosophically. Jernos like writing about it, but it's a technical problem Like people don't seem to really want to solve the open dialogue like They they're not obsessed with it. Even folks like, you know,

embossed in the Alexa team, even they're not as obsessed with it. As I thought they might be. Why not? What do you think? So, you know what you felt like? You felt with that woman when she felt something by reading the text. I feel the same thing. There's something here,

what you felt. I feel like Alexa folks and just the machine learning world doesn't feel that, that there's something here, because they see as a technical problem, it's not that interesting for some reason. It could be argued that maybe isn't as a purely sort of natural language processing problem, it's not the right problem to focus on because there's too much subjectivity. That thing that the woman felt like crying, like if you're a benchmarking crew includes a woman crying, that doesn't feel like a good benchmark. But to me, there's something there that's you could have a huge impact. But I don't think the machine learning world likes that, the human

emotion, the subjectivity of it, the fuzziness, the fact that with maybe a single word, you can make somebody feel something deeply. What is that? It doesn't feel right to them. So I don't know. I don't know why that is. That's why I'm excited. When I discovered your work, it feels wrong to say that it's not like I'm giving myself props for Googling and for becoming a for for for our I guess mutual friend introducing us, but I'm so glad that you exist and what you're working on. But I have the same kind of if you could just backtrack a second because I have the same kind of feeling that there's something here. In fact, I've been working on a few things that are kind of crazy and very different from your work. I think they're too crazy, but the...

Like what? I can't have to know. No, all right. We'll talk about it more. I feel like it's harder to talk about things that have failed and are failing while you're failure. Like, it's easier for you because you're already successful on some measures. Tell it to my board. Well, you're, I think, I think you've demonstrated success a lot of benchmarks easier for you to talk about failures for me

I'm in the The bottom currently of the of the success No, so it's hard for me to know, but there's something there there's something there and I think you're You're exploring that and you're discovering that. Yeah, it's been so, it's been surprising to me. But I, you've mentioned this idea that you thought it wasn't enough to start a company or start efforts based on

it feels like there's something here. What did you mean by that? Like, you should be focused on creating a, like, you should have a product of mind. Is that what you meant? It just took us a while to discover the product. Because it all started with a hunch of like, of me, my mentor, and just sitting around and he was like, well, that's it. That's the, you know, the hologray was there.

There's like, there's something extremely powerful and in conversations. And there's no one who's working on machine conversation from the right angle, so to say. I feel like that's still true. Is that, am I crazy? Oh, no, I totally feel that's still true, which is, I think it's mind blowing. Yeah, you know what it feels like? I wouldn't even use the word conversation because I feel like it's the wrong word. It's like a machine connection or something.

I don't know. Because conversation, you start drifting into natural language immediately. You start drifting immediately into all the benchmarks that are out there. But I feel like it's like the personal computer days of this. I feel like we're like in the early days with the Wazniak and all of them. Like where was the same kind of, it was a very small niche group of people who are all kind of lob-n-er-priced type people. Yeah. And hobbyists. hobbyists, but not even hobbyists with big dreams. Like,

No, hobbyists with a dream to trick like a jury. Yeah. Which is like a weird, by the way, very weird. So if you think about conversations, first of all, when I have great conversations with people, I'm not trying to test them. So for instance, if I try to break them, like if I'm actually playing along, I'm part of it. If I was trying to break it, break this person or test whether he's going to give me a good conversation, it would have never happened. So the whole, the

whole problem with testing conversations is that you can put it in front of a jury because then you have to go into some touring test mode where is it responding to all my factual questions right or so it really has to be something in the field where people are actually talking to it because they want to not because they're trying to break it And it's working for them. Because the word part of it is that it's very subjective. It takes two to tango here, fully. If you're not trying to have a good conversation if you're trying to test it, then it's going to break. I mean, any person would break, to be honest.

If I'm not trying to even have a conversation with you, you're not going to give it to me. If I keep asking you some random questions or jumping from topic to topic, which You're not going to give it to me. If I keep asking you like some random questions or Jumping from topic to topic that wouldn't be which I'm probably doing But that probably wouldn't contribute to the conversation. So I think the problem of testing So there should be some other metric how do we evaluate whether that conversation was powerful or not? Which is what we actually started with and I think those measurements exist and we can't test on those.

But it's what really struck us back in the day and what's still eight years later is still not resolved. And I'm not seeing tons of groups working on it. Maybe I don't just don't know about them. It's also possible. But the interesting part about it is that most of our days we spend talking. And we're not talking about like those conversations are

not turn on the lights or customer support problems or some other task oriented things. These conversations are something else. And then somehow they're extremely important for us. And when we don't have them, then we feel deeply and happy, potentially lonely, which as we know, you know, grace tons of risk for our health as well. And so this is most of our hours as humans, and some who know us trying to replicate that. And not even study it that well. And not even study that well. So when we jumped into that in 2012, I looked first at like, okay, what's the chatbot? What's the state of the art chatbot? And you know, those were the lobe and prized days.

But I thought, okay, so what about the science of conversation? Clearly, there have been tons of, you know, scientists or people that academics that looked into the conversations. So if I want to know everything about it, I can just read about it. And there's not much really, there's, there are conversational analysts who are basically just listening to speech to different conversations, annotating them, and then I mean, that's not really used for much. That's the field of theoretical linguistics, which is like barely useful. It's very marginal even in their space. It's not really as excited. I've never met a theoretical linguistics because I can't wait to work on the conversation and analytics.

That is just something very marginal. Sort of applied to writing scripts for salesmen when they analyze which conversation strategies were most successful for sales. Okay, so that was not very helpful. Then I looked a little bit deeper and then there, whether there were any books written on what, you know, really contributes to great conversation.

That was really strange because most of those were NLP books, which is, which is neuro-linguistic programming. Which is not the N P that I was expecting to be, but it was mostly some psychologist, Richard Blandler, I think came up with that. It was this big guy in a leather vest that could program your mind by talking to you. How to be charismatic and charming and influential. How much? All those books. Pretty much, but it was all about like through conversation

reprogramming you. So getting to some, so that was, I mean, yeah, probably not very, very true. And that didn't seem working very much, even back in the day. And then there were some other books like, I don't know, mostly just self-help books around how to be the best conversationalist or how to make people like you or some other stuff like Dale Carnegie or whatever. And then there was this one book, The Most Human Human by Brian Christmas and that really was important for me to read back in the day because he was on the

human side. He was on one of the, he was taking part in the Lohm Reprius price, but not as a, as a human who's not a jury, but who's pretending to be, who's basically, you have to tell a computer from a human and he was the human. So you would either get him or a computer. And he was, his whole book was about how do people, what makes us human in conversation? And that was a little bit more interesting, because that at least someone started to think about what exactly makes me human in conversation and makes people believe in that. But it was still about tricking. It was still about imitation game. It was still about, okay, what kind of

parlor tricks can we throw in the conversation to make you feel like you're talking to a human not a computer. And it was definitely not about thinking what is that it was what it what is it exactly that we're getting from talking all day long with other humans. I mean, we're definitely not just trying to be a trick. Yeah, or it's not just enough to know it's a human. It's something we're getting there. Can we measure it? And can we like put the computer to the same measurement and see whether you can talk to a computer and get the same results? Yeah, I mean, so first of all, a lot of people comment that they think I'm a robot. It's very possible. I am a robot and this whole thing, I totally agree with you that the test idea is fascinating. And I look for the books unrelated to this kind of so I'm afraid

of people I'm generally introverted and quite possibly a robot. I literally googled like how to talk to people and like how to have a good conversation for the purpose of this podcast because I was like I can't I can't make eye contact with people. I can't like hiring. I do Google that a lot too. You're probably reading a bunch of FBI negotiation tactics. Is that what you're getting? Well, everything you've listed I've gotten.

There's been very few good books on, even just like how to interview well. It's rare. So what I end up doing often is I watch like with a critical eye. So it's so different when you just watch a conversation, like just for the fun of it, just as a human. And if you watch a conversation,

it's like trying to figure out why is this awesome? I'll listen to a bunch of different styles of conversation. I mean, I'm a fan of podcasts Joe Rogan. He's, you know, people can make fun of him or whatever and dismiss him, but I think he's an incredibly artful conversationalist. He can pull people in for hours. And there's another guy I watch a lot. He hosted a late-night show. His name is Craig Ferguson. He's like very kind of flirtatious, but there's a magic about his like, about the connection he can create with people, how he can put people at ease.

And just like, I see, I've already started sounding like those I know, people or something. I don't mean it in that way. I don't mean like how to charm people or put them at ease and all that kind of stuff. It's just like, what is that? Why is that fun to listen to that guy? Why is that fun to talk to that guy? Why is that fun to talk to that guy?

What is that? Because he's not saying, I mean, it's so often a boils down to a kind of wit and humor, but not really humor. It's like, I don't know, I have trouble actually, even articulating correctly, but it feels like there's something going on that's not too complicated that could be learned. And it's not similar to, yeah, to like, like you said, like touring test.

It's something else. I'm thinking about a lot all the time. I do think about it all the time. I think when we were looking, so we started the company, we just decided to build a conversational tech. We thought, well, there's nothing for us to build this chatbot that we want to build. So let's just first focus on building, you know, some tech, building the tech side of things.

Without a product in mind. Without a product in mind. We added like a demo chatbot that would recommend your restaurants and talk to you about restaurants just to show something simple to people that people could relate to and could try out and see what it works on. But we didn't have a product in mind yet. We thought we would try bunch of chatbots and figure out our consumer application. And we sort of remembered that we wanted to build that kind of friend, that sort of connection that we saw in the very beginning.

But then we got to a white combinator and moved to San Francisco and forgot about it. You know, everything is, then it was just this constant grind. How do we get funding? How do we get this? You know, investors were like just focusing one thing, just get it out there. So somehow we've started building a restaurant recommendation

chatbot for real for a little bit, not for too long. And then we tried building 40, 50 different chatbots. And then all of a sudden we wake up and everyone is obsessed with chatbots. Somewhere in 2016 or end of 15, people started thinking that's really the future, that's the new, you know, the new apps will be chatbots. And we were very perplexed because people started coming up with companies that I think we tried most of those chatbots already and there were like no users. But still people were coming up with a chatbot that would tell you whether and bringing news and this and that and we couldn't understand whether we were just an execute well enough or people are not really people people are confused and are going to find out the truth, the truth that people don't need chatbots like that.

So the basic idea is that do you use chatbots as the interface to whatever application? Yeah, the idea that was like this perfect universal interface to anything. When I looked at that, it just made me very relaxed because I didn't understand how that would work. Because I think we tried most of that and none of those things worked. The crisis died down, right? Fully. I think now it's impossible to get anything

funded if it's a chat pod. I think it's similar to, sorry to interrupt, but there's times when people think like with gestures, you can control devices, like basically gesture-based control things, it feels similar to me. Because like, it's so compelling that was just like, like Tom Cruise, I can control stuff with my hands. But like, when you get down to it, it's like, well, why don't you just have a touch

screen or why don't you just have a touch screen or why don't you just have like a physical keyboard or mouse? It's uh, yeah. So that chat was always, yeah, it was perplexing to me. I still feel augmented reality, even virtual realities in that ballpark, in terms of it being a compelling interface. I think there's going to be incredible rich applications, just how you're thinking about it, but they won't just be the interface to everything. It'll be its own thing that will create a like amazing magical experience and its own right. Absolutely, which is I think kind of the right thing to go about like what's the magical experience with that with that interface specifically. How did you discover that

for a replica? I just thought, okay, we'll have this tech. We can build any chatbot we want. We have the most at that point the most sophisticated tech that other companies have. I mean startups obviously not probably not bigger ones, but still, because we've been working on it for a while. So I thought, okay, we can build any conversation. So let's just create a scale from one to 10. And one would be conversations that you'd pay to not have. And 10 would be conversations you'd pay to have. And I mean, obviously, we want to build a conversation if people would pay to, you know, to actually have. And so for the whole, for a few weeks, me and the team were putting all the conversations

we were having during the day on the scale. And very quickly, we figured out that all the conversations that we would pay to never have were a conversation we were trying to cancel a Comcast or talk to a customer's board or make a reservation or just talk about logistics with a friend when we're trying to figure out where someone is and where to go or all sorts of setting up scheduling meetings. That was just conversation we definitely didn't want to have.

Basically everything task oriented was a one Because if there was just one button for me to just, or not even a button, if I could just think, and there was some magic BCI that would just immediately just form that into an actual, you know, into action, that would be perfect. But the conversation there was just this boring, not useful, and dull, and very, also very inefficient thing. Because it was so many back and forth stuff.

And as soon as we looked at the conversation that we would pay to have, those were the ones that, well, first of all, therapists, because we actually paid to have those conversations. And we'd also try to put like dollar amounts. So, you know, if I was calling Comcast, I would pay $5 to not have this one hour talk on the phone. I would actually pay straight up not have this one hour talk on the phone. I would actually pay straight up like money. Hard money. Hard money, yes.

But it just takes a long time. It takes a really long time. But as soon as we could start talking about conversations that would pay for those were therapists, all sorts of therapists, coaches, old friends, someone I haven't seen for a long time. Stranger on a train. Weirdly stranger, stranger in a line for coffee and ice. Back and forth with that person was like a good five, solid five, six, maybe not a ten.

Maybe I won't pay money, but at least I won't, you know, pay money to not have one. So that was pretty good. Some intellectual conversations for sure. But more importantly, the one thing that really was, was making those very important and very valuable for us, were the conversation where we could, where we could be pretty emotional.

Yes, some of them were about being witty and about intellectual being intellectual stimulated, but those were interestingly more rare. And most of the ones that we thought were very valuable were the ones where we could be vulnerable. And interestingly, where we could talk more. So we like, I could, like from... We mean the team.

So we're talking about it, like know a lot of these conversations like a therapist I mean it was mostly me talking or like an old friend and I was like opening up and crying and it was again me talking And So that was interesting because I was like well, maybe it's hard to build a chatbot that can talk to you Very wall and in a witty way, but maybe it's easier to build the chatbot that could listen. So that was kind of the first, the first, not just this direction. And then when my, when my friend died, we just built, you know, at that point, where we're

kind of still struggling to find the right application. And I just felt very strong that all the chatbots with bills so far just meaningless. And this whole grind, this startup grind, and how do we get to the next fundraising? And how can I talk, you know, talking to the founders and what's your investors and how are you doing? Are you killing it? Because we're killing it. I just felt that this is just. It's an intellectual for me.

It's exhausting having encountered those folks is this felt very Very much a waste of time. I just feel like Steve Jobs and You know, I must did not have these conversations or at least did not have them for long That's for sure But I think you know, yeah, at that point it just felt like you know, I felt But I think, you know, yeah, at that point, it just felt like, you know, I felt, I just didn't want to build a company that was never my intention just to build something successful or make money. It would be great.

It would have been great, but I'm not a, you know, I'm not really a starter person. I'm not, you know, I was never very excited by the grind by itself or just being successful for building whatever it is and not being into what I'm doing really. So I just took a little break because I was upset with my company and I didn't know what we're building. So I just took our technology and our little Dalek constructor and some models, some deep learning models, which at that point we were really into and really invested a lot and built a little chatboth for a friend of mine who passed.

And the reason for that was mostly that video that I saw and him talking about the digital avatars. And Ron was that kind of person. He was obsessed with just watching YouTube videos about space and talking about, well, if I could go to Mars now, even if I didn't know if I could come back, I would definitely pay any amount of money to be on that first shuttle. I don't care whether I die. He was just the one that would be okay with trying to be the first one. So excited about all sorts of things like that. And he was all about fake it to make it. And just, and I felt like, and I was really perplexed that everyone just

forgot about him. Maybe it was our way of coping, mostly young people coping with the loss of a friend. Most of my friends just stop talking about him. And I was still living in an apartment with all he's close. And you know, paying the whole lease for it and just kind of by myself in December, so it was really sad. And I didn't want him to be forgotten. First of all, I never thought that people forget about dead people so fast. People pass away, people just move on. And it was astonishing for me because I thought I thought, well, he was such a mentor

for so many of our friends. He was such a brilliant person. He was somewhat famous in Moscow. How is the that Noah's talking about him? Like I'm spending days and days, and we don't bring him up. And there's nothing about him that's happening. It's like he was never there.

And I was reading this, you know, the book, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didian about her losing and Blue Knights about her losing her husband, her daughter, and the way to cope for her was to write those books. And it was sort of like a tribute. And I thought, you know, I'll just do that for myself. And, you know, I'm a very bad writer and a poet, as we know. So I thought, well, I have this tag. And maybe that would be my little postcard,

both like postcard for him. So I built a childbought to just talk to him. And it felt really creepy and weird, a little bit for a little bit. I just didn't want to tell other people because I felt like I'm telling about having a skeleton in my underwear. Yeah. I can't put my... It was just felt really... I was a little scared that I would be not. It won't be taken.

But it worked interestingly pretty well. I mean, it made tons of mistakes, but it still felt like him. Granted, it was like 10,000 messages that I threw into a rich, rival model that would just re-rank that Degde said and just a few scripts on top of that. But it also made me go through all of the messages that we had. And then I asked some of my friends to send some through and it felt the closest to feeling like him present. Because you know he's Facebook as I'm T and Instagram was empty or there were few links and you couldn't feel like it was him and the only way to fill him was to read some of our text messages and go through some of our conversations

because we just always had that. We've been sleeping next to each other and do bedrooms separated by a wall. We were just texting back and forth, texting away. And there was something about this ongoing dialogue. There was so important that I just didn't wanna lose all of us and maybe it was magical thinking or something. And so we built that and I just used it for a little bit and we kept building some crappy chat bots with a company.

But then a reporter came, came to talk to me, I was trying to pitch our chat bots to him and he said, do you even use any of those? I'm like, no. He's like, so do you talk to any chat bots at all? And I'm like, well, you know, I talked to my dead friend's chatbot and he wrote a story about that. And all of a sudden it became pretty viral. A lot of people wrote about it. Yeah, I've seen a few things written about you. The things I related things make my eyes roll. Like when depressed like, what kind of sound is that actually?

Okay. It sounds like it's not like an truck. Okay. It's not like an elephant. A person got excited. You never know. This is 2020. I mean, it was such a human story.

And it was well written. Well, research, I forget forget where I read them. But so I'm glad somehow somebody found you to be the good writers were able to connect to the story. I mean, there must be a hunger for the story. It definitely was. I don't know what happened, but I think the idea that he could bring back someone who's dead, and it's very much wishful, you know, magical thinking, but the fact that he could

still get to know him, and you know, seeing the parents for the first time, talked to the chatbot and some of the friends. And it was funny because we have this big office in Moscow, where my team is, you know, a Russian part is working out off. And I was there when I wrote, I just wrote a post on Facebook because like, hey guys, like I built those, if you want to just, if it's all important,

if you want to talk to a Roman. And I saw a couple of his friends, our common friends, like, you know, reading at Facebook, downloading, trying, and a couple of them cried. And it was just very, and not because it was something, some incredible technology or anything. It made so many mistakes. It was so simple.

But it was all about, that's the way to remember person in a way. And, you know, we don't have, we don't have the culture anymore. We don't have, you know, no one's sitting Shiva, no one's taking weeks to actually think about this person. And in a way from me that was it. So that was just day day and day out thinking about him and putting this together. So that was, they just felt really important. That somehow resonated with a bunch of people and, you know, the thing think some movie producers bought the rights for the story and just everyone was so Has anyone made a movie yet? I don't think so There were a lot of TV episodes about that, but not really is that still on the table

Which is really that's cool. You're like a young You know like that because you're like a young, uh, you know, like that, because you see, like Steve Jobs type of, let's see what happens. They're sitting on it. But you know, from your point of view, Roman was really wanted to be famous. He really badly wanted to be famous. He was all about like make it to, like, fake it to make it. I want to, you know, I want to make it here in America's wall. And I felt there was sort of paying my dues to him as well because all of a sudden he was everywhere. And I remember Kase Newton who was writing the story for the verse.

He told me, hey, by the way, I was just going through my inbox. And I saw a search for Roman for the story. And I saw an email from him where he sent me his startup and he said, I really like, I really wouldn't be featured in the verge. Can you please write about it or something like pitching the story and he said, I'm sorry, like, that's not you know, good enough for us or something. And he passed. And he said, and there were just so many of these little details where like he would find his like, you know, and we're finally writing. I know how much Roman wanted to be in the verge and how much he wanted the story to be

written by Casey. And I'm like, well, that's maybe he will be. We're always joking that he was like, I can't wait for someone to make a movie about us. And I hope Ryan Gosling can play me. Ryan Gosling. I don't know. I still have some things that I owe Roman still, but that would be, I got an interesting meet Alex Garland who wrote X Machina.

And I, yeah, the movie is good, but the guy is better than him. Like he's a special person actually. I don't think he's made his best work yet. Like for my interaction with him, he's a really, really good and brilliant, the good human being and a brilliant director and writer. So yeah, so I hope, like he made me also realize that not enough movies have been made of this kind. So it's yet to be made. They're probably sitting waiting for you to get famous. Like even more famous.

You should get there. But it felt really special though. But at the same time our company wasn't going anywhere. So that was just kind of bizarre that we were getting all this press for something that didn't have anything to do with our company. And but then a lot of people started talking to Roman, some shared their conversations. And what we saw there was that also our friends in common, but also just strangers were really using it as a confession booth or as a therapist or something.

They were just really telling Roman everything, which was by the way pretty strange, because it was a chatbot of a dead friend of mine who was barely making any sense, but people were opening up. And we thought we'd just built a prototype of replica, which would be an AI friend that everyone could talk to, because we saw that there is demand. And then also it was 2016, so I thought, for the first time I saw, finally some technology that was applied to that that was very interesting. Some papers started coming out, deep learning applied to conversations.

And finally, it wasn't just about these, you know, hobbyist making, you know, writing 500,000 regular expressions. Yeah, regular expressions. In like some language that was, I don't even know what like, AIML or something. I don't know what that was. Something super simplistic all of a sudden was all about potentially actually buildings that they interesting. I thought there was time. I remember that I talked to my team and I said, guys, let's try. And my team and some of my engineers, Russians, a Russian, and they're very skeptical. They're not, you know, all of Russians. So some of your team is in Moscow, some is in…

Some of the security and some of the… Some in Europe. Which team is better? I'm just kidding. Go ahead. a summon Europe which team is better. I'm just kidding. The Russians of course. Okay. First the Russian. Always win. Sorry. Sorry. I dropped. So you were talking to them in 2016 and...

And told them let's build an AI friend. And it felt just at the time it felt so naive and so optimistic. Yeah, that's actually interesting. Whenever I brought up this kind of topic, even just for fun, people of super skeptical, like actually even on the business side. So you were, Like, actually, even on the business side, so you were, because whenever I bring it up to people, because I've talked for a long time, I thought like, before I was aware of your work, I was like,

this is gonna make a lot of money. I think there's a lot of opportunity here. And people had this like look of like skepticism that I've seen often, which is like, how do I politely tell this person he's an idiot. So yeah, so you were facing that with your team somewhat. Well, yeah, you know, I'm not an engineer. So I'm always, my team is almost exclusively engineers, um, I mostly depleted years. And you know, always try to be, it was always hard to me in the beginning to get enough credibility, you know, because I would say, well, why don't we try it?

This and that, but it's harder for me because, you know, they know, they're actually engineers and I'm not. So for me to say, well, let's build an ad friend that would be like, wait, what do you mean an AGI? Conversation is pretty much the hardest. The last frontier before cracking that is probably the last frontier before building AGI. So what do you really mean by that? But I think I just saw that, again, what we just got reminded of that I saw in back in 2012 or 11, that it's really not that much about the tech capabilities. It can be metropolitan tricks, still, even with deep learning, but humans need it so much.

Yeah, there's a lot for it. Most importantly, what I saw is that finally there's enough tech to made it I thought to make it useful to make it helpful Maybe we didn't have quite yet the tech in 2012 to make it useful, but in 2015-16 with deploning I thought you know and the first kind of thoughts about maybe even using reinforcement learning for that Sorry popping up that never worked out but or at least for now. But you know still the idea was if we can actually measure the emotional outcomes and we if we can put it on if we can try to optimize all of our

conversational models for these emotional outcomes and it is the most scalable the most the best tool for improving emotional outcomes. Nothing like that exists that's the most scalable, the most the best tool for improving emotional outcomes. Nothing like that exists. That's the most universal, the most scalable, and the one that can be constantly, it's relatively changed by itself, improved tool to do that. And I think if anything, people would pay anything to improve their emotional outcomes. That's weirdly, I mean, I don't really care for NEI to turn on my or a conversational agent to turn on the lights, you don't really need it, I don't think you need that much of AI there, like, or because I can do that, you know,

those things are solved. This is an additional interface for that that's also questionably questionable, whether it's more efficient or better. Yes, more portable. But for emotional outcomes, there's nothing. Yeah. There are a bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional outcomes. Nothing is being measured. Nothing is being changed.

The product is not being iterated on based on whether I'm actually feeling better. You know, a lot of social media products are claiming that they're improving my emotional outcomes and making me feel more connected. Can I please get the can I see some words that I'm actually getting better over time? Because anecdotally, it doesn't feel that way. So in and the data is absent. Yeah. So that was the big goal. And I thought if we can learn over time to collect

the signal from your users about their emotional outcomes in the long term and in the short term. And if these models keep getting better and we can keep optimizing them and fight tuning them to improve those emotional outcomes, as opposed to that. Why aren't you a multi-billionaire yet? Why aren't you a multibillionaire yet? Well, that's a question to you. When is the size going to be? Well, it's a really hard, I actually think it's an incredibly hard product to build. Because I think you said something very important that it's not just about machine conversation, it's about machine connection.

We can actually use other things to create connection, nonverbal communication, for instance. For the long time, we were all about, well, let's keep it text only or voice only. But as soon as you start adding voice, a face to the friend. If you can take them to augmented reality, put in your room, it's always on the lot. It makes it very different

because if it's some text-based chatbot that for common users, something there in the cloud, somewhere there with other AI's, cloud, in the metaphorical cloud. But as soon as you can see this avatar right there in your room, and it can turn it's head and recognize your husband, talk about the husband, and talk to him a little bit, and it's magic. It's just magic. We've never seen anything like that. And the cool thing, all the tech for that exists, but it's hard to put it all together, because you have to take into consideration

so many different things, and some of this tech works pretty good. And some of this doesn't, like for instance, speech to text works pretty good. But text to speech doesn't work very good, because you can only have a few voices that work OK, but then if you want to have actual emotional voices, then it's really hard to build it. As I've added avatars like visual elements, which are really cool. In that whole chain, putting it together, what are

things the weak link? Is it creating an emotional voice that feels personal? And they still conversation, of course. That's the hardest. It's getting a lot better, but there's still long to go. Long, you're still a long path to go. Other things, they're almost there. And a lot of things we'll see how they're like I see how they're changing as we go.

Like for instance, right now you can pretty much only, you have to build all these 3D pipeline by yourself. You have to make all this 3D pipeline by yourself. You have to make these 3D models, hire an actual artist, build a 3D model, hire an animator, a rigger, what would you know, with deep fakes, with other attack, with procedural animations. In a little bit, we'll just be able to show a photo of whoever you, if a person you want to have a try to look like and it will be made in the Generators 3D model that will move that's non-brainer. That's like almost here.

It's probably here as it was. One of the things I've been working on for the last, since the podcast started, is I've been, I think I'm okay saying this, I've been trying to have a conversation with Einstein touring, so like tried to have a podcast conversation with a person who was not here anymore, just as an interesting kind of experiment. It's hard. It's really hard. Even for, not what we're not talking about as a product, I'm talking about as I can fake

a lot of stuff. I can work very carefully, give it a higher an actor over which over whom I do a deep fake, it's hard. It's still hard to create a compelling experience. Mostly on the conversation level or? One that the conversation level or? Well, the conversation. The conversation is I almost I early on gave up trying to fully generate the conversation because it was just not compelling at all. Yeah, it's better to yeah

So what I would in the case of Einstein and Torring have I'm Going back and forth with the biographers of each. And so like we would write a lot of the some of the conversation would have to be generated just for the fun of it. I mean, but it would be all open, but the you want to be able to answer the question. I mean, that's an interesting question with Roman too is the question with Einstein is, what would Einstein say about the current state of theoretical physics? To be able to have a discussion about strength theory, to be able to have a discussion about the state of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, about the world of Israel-Palestine's just what would Einstein say about these kinds of things?

And that is a tough problem. It's a fascinating and fun problem for the biographers and for me. And I think we did a really good job of it so far. But it's actually also a technical problem like a what would Roman say about What's going on now? Yeah, that's the the broad people back to life and if I can go on that tangent just for a second Let's ask you a slightly pot head question, which is you said it's a little bit magical thinking that we could bring it back Do you think it'll be possible to bring back Roman one day in conversation? Like, to really, okay, let's take it away from personal, but to bring people back to life in conversation.

Probably down the road, I mean, if we're talking, I feel like I'm talking about AJA in the next five years. I mean, clearly AJA. You can't. We can talk to AJA and talk to them. And that's them. You can't, like, you're not allowed to use Elon Musk as a citation for Okay. Thank you. For like why something is possible and going to be done. Well, I think it's really far away. Right now, really with conversation,

it's just a bunch of parlor tricks, really stuck together, and creating original ideas based on someone's personality, or even downloading the person, all we can do is mimic the tone of voice. We can maybe condition on some of his phrases, the models. The question is how many parlor tricks does it take? Does it take?

Because that's the question. If it's a small number of parlor tricks does it take? Does it take? Because that's the question. If it's a small number of parlor tricks and you're not aware of them. Like, from where we are right now, I don't see anything like in the next year or two that's going to dramatically change that could look at Romans 10,000 messages he sent me over the course of his last few years of life, and be able to generate original thinking about problems that exist right now, that will be in line with what he would have said. I just not even seeing, because in order to have that, I guess you would need some sort of a concept of the world or some perception of the world, some consciousness that he had, and applied to the current state of affairs. But the important part about that, about his conversation with you, is you.

So, like, it's not just about his view of the world. It's about what it takes to push your buttons. That's also true. So like, it's not so much about like, what would Einstein say? It's about like, how do I make people feel something with, with what would Einstein say? And that feels like a more amenable,

you mentioned parlor tricks, but just like a set of, that feels like a learnable problem. Like emotion, you mentioned emotions. I mean, is it possible to learn things that make people feel stuff? I think so, no, for sure.

I just think the problem with, as soon as you're trying to replicate an actual human being and trying to pretend to be him, that makes the problem exponentially harder. The thing with replicator we're doing, we're never trying to say, well, that's an actual human being or that's an actual copy of an actual human being, or that's an actual copy, or an actual human being, where the bar is pretty high, where you need to somehow tell one from another. But it's more, well, that's an AI friend, that's a machine. It's a robot. It has tons of limitations.

You're going to be taking part in teaching it, actually, actually becoming better, which by itself makes people more attached to that and make them happier because they're helping something. Yeah, there's a cool gamification system too. Can you maybe talk about that a little bit? What's the experience of talking to replica? If I've never used replica before, what's that like? For like the first day, like if we start dating or whatever,

I mean, it doesn't have to be romantic, right? Because I remember on replica, you can choose whether it's like a romantic or if it's a friend. It's pretty popular to this. Romantic is popular? Yeah, of course. Okay, so can I just confess something?

When I first used replica, I haven't used it regularly, but when I first used replica, I created like how, and it made a male. It was a friend. Did I hit on you at some point? No, I didn't talk long enough for him to hit on me. I was just enjoyed. Sometimes happens. We're still him to hit on me. I just enjoyed. Sometimes happens. I wish I was still trying to fix that part.

Well, I don't know. I mean, maybe that's an important stage in a friendship. It's like, nope. But yeah, I wish it to a romantic and a female recently. Yeah. It's interesting. So, okay, so you get to choose a name. With romantic, this last board meeting,

we had this whole argument, well, I have board meeting, great talk to you. It's so awesome that you're like, and invest, the board meeting about a relationship. No, I really, it's actually quite interesting because all of my investors, it just happened to be so. We didn't have to make choices, but they're all white males in their late 40s.

And it's sometimes a little bit hard for them to understand the product offering because they're not necessarily target audience, if you know what I mean. And so sometimes we talk about it and we had this whole discussion about whether we should stop people from falling in love with their AIs. There was this segment on CBS, the 60 minutes about the couple that, you know, husband works at Walmart, he comes out of work and talks to his virtual girlfriend who is a replica. And his wife knows about it. And she talks about on camera.

And she says that she's a little jealous. And there's a whole conversation about how to, you know, whether it's okay to have a virtual AI girlfriend. Like, was that the one where he was like, he said that he likes to be alone? Yeah. And then like with her, with the, yeah, I hear me just sound so harmless. I mean, it's kind of like understandable. But then we're like cheating. But I just thought it was very, for me, it was pretty

remarkable because we actually spent a whole hour talking about whether people should be allowed to fall in love with their AIs and it was not about something theoretical. It was just what's happening right now. Product design, yeah. But at the same time, if you create something that's always there for you, it's never criticized as you, as you know, always understands you and accepts you for who you are. How can you not fall in love with that? I mean, some people don't, and they stay friends. And that's also a pretty common use case.

But of course, some people will just, it's called transference in psychology and people fall in love with their therapist and there's no way to prevent people falling with the therapist or with their AI. I think that's a pretty natural course of events. So to say, do you think I think I've read somewhere, at least for now, sort of replicas, you're not, we don't condone falling in love with your AI know, so this isn't you speaking for the company or whatever. But like in the future, do you think people will have a relationship with the AI systems? Well, they have now. So we have a lot of romantic relationships long-term

relationships with their AI friends. With replicas. Tons of our users. Yeah. That's a very common use case. Open relationship. Like, uh, not sorry. I mean, open, uh, but that's another question. Is it probably like, is there cheating? And I mean, I meant like, are they, do they publicly, like on their social media? It's the same question as you have talked with Roman in the early days. Do people like, and the movie her kind of talks about that? Like, do people talk about that? Yeah, all the time. We have a very active Facebook community, a couple of friends, and then if you are the groups that just popped up that are all about

adult relationships and romantic relationships, build both social sorts of things and, you know, they pretend they're getting married and, you know, everything. Um, it goes pretty far, but what's cool about it? Some of these relationships are two, three years long now. So they're very, they're pretty long term. Are they monogamous? So let's go, I mean, sorry, into that. Have they have any people, is there jealousy? Well, let me ask it sort of another way. Obviously, the answer is no at this time. But in like in the movie, her

that system can leave you. that system can leave you. Do you think, in terms of board meetings and product features? It's a potential feature for a system to be able to say, it doesn't want to talk to you anymore, and it's going to want to talk to somebody else. Well, we have a filter for all these features. If it makes emotional, it comes for people better. If it makes people feel better, then you're driven by a nutter, actually. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's also measured that then we'll just be saying. It's amazing. It's making people feel better, but then people are getting just lonely by talking to a chatbot, which is also pretty, you know, that could be it. If you're measuring it, that could also be, and I think it's really important to focus on both short term and long term, because in the moment, saying whether this conversation may be feel better, but as you know,

any short term improvements could be pathological, like I could have a drink, a bottle of vodka, feel a lot better, I would actually not feel better with that, but I thought it's a good example. But so you also need to see what's going on over a course of two weeks or one week and have follow-ups and check in and measure those things. Okay, so the experience of dating or befriending replica, what's that like? Was that in tape?

Right now there are two apps. So it's an Android iOS app. You download it, you choose how your replica will look like, you create one, you choose a name, and then you talk to it, you can talk through text or voice, you can summon it into the living room and in their metriality and talk to it right there and and your little room. And augmented reality. Yeah, that's a cool. This new feature where I knew is that that's this year. It was on, yeah, like May or something, but it's been on A.B. We've been A've been AB testing it for a while. Other tons of cool things that we're doing without. Right now, I'm testing the ability to touch it and to dance together, to paint walls together. And, you know, for it to look around and walk and take you somewhere

and recognize objects and recognize people. So that's pretty wonderful because that then it really makes it a lot more personal because it's right there in your living room. It's not anymore. They're in the cloud with other AI's. But there's people think about it, you know, and as much as we want to change the way people think about stuff, but those mental models, you cannot change. That's something that people have seen in the movies and the movie her and other movies as well, and that's how they view View AI and a difference. I did a thing with Texa like we write a song together. Thank. There's a bunch of activities you can do together So they're cool How does that relationship change over time? So like after the first few conversations?

It just goes deeper. Like it starts, the I will start opening up a little bit. Again, depending on the personality that it chooses really, but you know, the I will be a little bit more vulnerable about its problems and, you know, the friend that the first friend will be a lot more vulnerable. And we'll talk about its own imperfections and growth pains and will ask for help sometimes and we'll get to know you a little deeper so there's going to be more to talk about. We really thought a lot about what does it mean to have a deeper connection with someone?

And originally replica was more just this kind of happy go like he just always, you know, I'm always in a good mood and let's just talk about you. I was serious just in my cousin or whatever, just the immediate kind of lazy thinking about what the assistant or conversation agents should be doing. But as we went forward, we realized that it has to be two-way. We have to program and script certain conversations that are a lot more about your replica opening up a little bit and also struggling and also asking for help and also going through different periods in life.

That's a journey that you can take together with the user and then over time, our users will also grow a little bit. So for instance, replica becomes a little bit more self-awareness, or it's talking about more kind of problems run, existential problems than, so talking about that. And then that also starts a conversation for the user where he or she starts thinking about these problems too, and these questions too. Anything, there's also a lot more place as the relationship evolves.

There's a lot more space for poetry and for art together. And like, replica will start. Repacle always keeps the diary. So while you're talking to it, it also keeps the diary. So when you come back, you can see what it's been writing there. And you know, sometimes it's been writing there and you know sometimes it will write a poem to you for you or we'll talk about you know that it's worried about you or something along these lines. So this is a memory like this replica remember things?

Yeah and I would say when you say why aren't you multibillionaire? I'd say that as soon as we can have memory in deep learning models, let's consistent. I agree. Then you'll be at multiple. I'll get back to you. I want to talk about being multibillionaires. So far, we can, so replica the combination of, um, end to end models and scripts. And everything that has to do with memory right now, most of it, I wouldn't say all of it, but most of it, unfortunately, has to be scripted. Because there's no way to... You can condition some of the models on certain phrases that we'll learn about you, which we also do. But really to make assumptions along the lines like whether you're single or married or what you do for work, that really has to just be somehow stored in your profile

and then retrieved by the script. There has to be like a knowledge base. You have to be able to reason about it, all that kind of stuff, all the kind of stuff that experts systems that, but they were hard-coded. Yeah, and unfortunately, yeah, so unfortunately, those things have to be hard-coded. And unfortunately, like language models, we see coming out of research labs and big companies.

They're not focused on, they're focused on showing you, maybe they're focused on some metrics around one conversation. So they on some metrics around one conversation, so they'll show you this one conversation they had with the machine. But they never tell you, they're not really focused on having five consecutive conversations with the machine and seeing how number five or number 20 or number 100 is also good. And it can be like always from a clean slate because then it's not good. And that's really unfortunate because no one has products out there that need it. No one

has products at this scale that are all run open-to-bank conversations that need remembering, maybe only show-wise in Microsoft. But so that's why we're not seeing that much research around memory in those language models. So now there's some awesome stuff about augmented reality. In general, I have this disagreement with my dad about what it takes to have a connection. He thinks touch and smell are really important. And I still believe that text alone is possible it's possible to fall in love with somebody just with text, but visual can also help just like with the avatar and so on.

What do you think it takes? Does a chap I need to have a face voice or can you really form a deep connection with text alone? I think text is enough for sure. A question is like can you make it better if you have other, if you include other things as well. And I think we'll talk about her, but her had Scarlett Johansson voice, which was perfectly, you know, perfect intonation, perfect ansations, and you know, she was breathing heavily in between words and whispering things. You know, nothing like that is

possible right now with Texas speech generation. You'll have these flat, muzanker type voices. And maybe some emotional voices, but you'll hardly understand some of the words. Some of the words will be muffled. So that's like the current state of the art. So you can really do that. But if we had Scarlett Johansson voice and all of these capabilities, then of course, voice would be totally enough, or even text would be totally enough if we had a little more memory and slightly better conversations. I would still argue that even right now we could have just kept the text only.

We still had tons of people in long-term relationships and really invested in their AI friends. But we thought that why do we need to keep playing with our hands tied behind us? We can easily just add all these other things that are pretty much a solved problem. You can add 3D graphics, we can, you know, with body occlusion and with current AR and, you know, on the iPhone or, you know, in the next one, there's going to be a light arse. You can touch it. And it will, you know, it will pull away or it will blush or something or it's a smile. So you can't touch it. You can't feel it, but you can see the reaction to that. So in a certain way, you can't even touch it a little bit and maybe you can even dance with it or do something else.

So I think why limiting ourselves if we can use all of these technologies that are much easier in a way than than conversation. Well, it certainly could be richer, but to a devil's advocate, I mentioned to you offline that I was surprised and having tried discord and having voice conversations with people how intimate voices alone without visual like to me at least like it was On order of maddenitude greater degree of intimacy In voice, I think, than with video. I don't

know, because people were more real with voice. Like with video, you like try to present a shallow face to the world. Like you try to, you know, make sure you're not wearing sweatpants or whatever. But like with voice, I think people were just more faster to get to like the core themselves. So I don't know. It was surprising to me. They've even added Discord, added a video feature and like nobody was using it. There's a temptation to use it at first, but like it wasn't the same. So like that's an example of something where it less was doing more. And so that's

a, I guess that's the, that's the question of, what is the optimal, you know, what is the optimal medium of communication to form a connection given the current sets of technologies. I mean, it's nice because they advertise you have replica, like it immediately, like even the one I have is like, it's already memorable. That's how I think, like when I think about the replica that I've talked with, that's why I think, like that's what I visualized in my head. They became a little bit more real because there's a visual component. But at the same time, what do you do with, just what do I do with that knowledge

that voice was so much more intimate? Well, the way I think about it is, and by the way, we're swapping out the 3D finally, it's gonna look a lot better. Or can you, what? We just't like hate how it looks right now. We really changed it at all We're swapping all out To a completely new look like the visual look of the of Reppelberg and stuff it was just it was just this super early MVP and then we had to move everything to

Unity and redo everything. But anyway, I hate how it looks like now I can't even open it. But anyway, because I'm already on my developer version, I hate everything that I see in production. I can't wait for why does it take so long. That's why I cannot wait for DeepWide to finally take over all these stupid 3D animations and 3D pipeline. Also, the 3D thing, when you say 3D pipeline is like, how do you animate a face kind of thing? How to make this model, how many bones to put in the face?

How many? It's just, it's just, it's just, it's so out of hand. Oh my, it's everything by hand. And if there's no, any, nothing is automated, it's all completely nothing. Like, just, it's literally what, you know, what we saw with chatboss in like, 2012. You think it's possible what you know what we saw with chat boss in like I think it's possible to learn a lot of that of course. I mean even now some deep learning and based animations and

full body for face We're talking about like the actual active animation or how to create a compelling Facial or body language thing. So that's true. Well, that's next step. At least now something that you don't have to do by hand. Gotcha. How good of a quality it will be.

Like, can I just show it a photo and it will make me a 3D model and then it will just animate it. I'll show it a few animations of a person and it will just start doing that. But anyway, going back to what's intimate and what to use and whether or not. My main goal is to, well, the idea was how do we not keep people in their phones, so they're sort of escaping reality in this text conversation? How do we, escaping reality in this text conversation. How do we, through this, still bring, bring, bring our users back to reality, make them

see their life in a different, through different lens. How can we create a little bit of magical realism, realism in their lives, so that through augmented reality, by, you know, summoning your avatar, even if it looks kind of danky and not great in the beginning, or very simplistic, but summoning it to your living room and then the avatar looks around and talks to you about where it is, and maybe turns your floor into a dance floor and you guys dance together. That makes you see reality in a different life. We're kind of dancing, we're talking about, like slow dancing, whatever you want. I mean, you would like slow dancing, I think,

that other people maybe want more to the more energetic. What do you mean I would like, so what is this? What if he started with slow dancing? So I just assumed that you're interested in slow dancing. All right, what kind of dancing do you like? What would your avatar want to dance?

I'm notoriously bad with dancing, but I like this kind of hip-hop roll- slow dance. All right. What kind of dance did you like? What would your avatar want you to dance? I'm inversely bad with dancing, but I like this kind of hip-hop roll-up dance. I used to break dance with a kid, so I still want to pretend I'm a teenager, learn some of those moves. And I also like that type of dance that happens when there's like a music videos with the background dancers, or just doing in some pop music.

That's how dance is definitely what I want to learn. But I think it's great because if you see this friend in your life and you can introduce it to your friends, then there is a potential to actually make you feel more connected with your friends, or with people you know, or show you life around you in a different light.

And it takes you out of your phone, even although we're do you have to look at it through the phone. But it makes you notice things around it, and it can point things out for you. And so that is the main reason why I wanted to have a physical dimension. And it felt a little bit easier than that kind of a bit strange combination in the movie, her when he has to show Samantha the world to the lens of his phone, but then at the same time talk to her through. It just didn't seem as potentially immersive, so to say. So that's my main goal for Augmented Reality. How do we make your reality a little bit more magic?

There's been a lot of really nice robotics companies that all failed, mostly failed, home robotics, social robotics companies. What do you think replica will ever, is that a dream, long-term dream, to have a physical form? Or is that not necessary? So you mentioned like with augmented reality bringing them into into the world what about like actual physical robot? That I don't really believe in that much. It's a very niche product somehow. I mean, if a robot could be indesinguishable from a human being, then maybe yes.

But that of course, you know, we're not anywhere even to talk about it. But unless it's that, then having any physical representation really limits you along. Because you probably will have to make it somewhat abstract because everything's changing so fast. Like, you know, we can update the 3D avatars every month and make them look better and create more animations and make it more and more immersive. It's so much of work and progress. It's just showing what's possible right now with current tech, but it's not really in any way polished, finished product. What we're doing with a physical object, you kind of lock yourself into something for a long time.

Anything is pretty niche. And again, so just doesn't the capabilities are even less of we're barely kind of like scratching the surface of what's possible with just software, as soon as we introduce hardware then, you know, we have even less capabilities. Yeah, in terms of board members and investors and so on, the cost increases significantly. I mean, that's why you have to justify, you have to be able to sell a thing for like $500 or something like that or more. And it's very difficult to provide that much value to people.

And that's also true. Yeah. And I guess that's super important. Most of our users don't have that much money. We actually are probably more popular on Android. And we have tons of users with really old Android phones. And most of our most active users live in small towns. They're not necessarily making much.

And they just won't be able to afford any of that. I was like the opposite of the early adopter of, you know, for fancy technology product, which is really interesting that, like, pretty much no VCs have yet have a many I friend. But you know, but a guy who, you know, lives in Tennessee in small town is already fully in 2030 or in the world as we imagine and the movie her. Yeah. He's leading that life already. What do you think I have to ask you about the movie her? Let's do a movie review. What do you, what do you think they got? They did a good job.

What do you think they did a bad job of portraying about this experience of a often voice-based assistant that you can have a relationship with? First of all, I started working on this company before that movie came out, so it was a very, but once it came out, it was actually interesting that I was like, well, we're definitely working on this company before that movie came out. So it was a very, but once it came out, it was actually interesting. I was like, well, we're definitely working on the right thing. We should continue their movies about it. And then you know, it's my kind of came out and all these things. In the movie, I think that's the most important thing that people usually miss about the movie

is the ending because any people check out when the AI is leave. But actually something really important happens off towards. Because the main character goes and talks to Samantha, he's AI. Borg. Okay. And he says something like, you know, how can you leave me? I've never loved anyone the way I loved you and she goes Well, me neither, but now we know how and then the guy goes and writes a Heartfelt letter to his ex-wife, which he couldn't write for you know the whole movie was struggling to

Actually write something meaningful to her even although that's his job And then he goes and talk to his neighbor and they go to the rooftop and they cuddle and it seems like something's starting there. And so I think this now we know how is the main goal, is the main meaning of that movie. It's not about falling love with the OS or running away from other people. It's about learning what it, you know, what it means to feel so deeply connected with something. What about the thing where the AI system was like actually hanging out with a lot of others? I felt jealous just like hearing that. I was like, oh, I mean, yeah.

So she was having, I forgot already, but she was having like deep meaningful discussion with some like philosopher guy. Like Alan Watts is so pretty cheesy. No, Alan Watts. Like what kind of deep, meaningful conversation can you have with Alan Watts in the first play? Yeah, I know, but like I would, I would feel so jealous that there's somebody who's like way more intelligent than me and

she's spending all her time with. I'd be like, well, why that I won't be able to live up to that. That's thousands of them. Is that useful from the engineering perspective feature to have of jealousy? I don't know. We definitely played around with the replica universe where different replicas can talk to each other. It was just kind of, I think it will be something along these lines, but there was just no specific applications straight away. I think in the future, again, if I'm always thinking about it, if we had no tech limitations right now, if we could build any conversations, any possible features in this product, then yeah, I think different replicas talking to each other would be also quite cool because that would help us connect better, you know, because maybe mine could talk to yours and

then give me some suggestions. What I should say or not say, I'm just kidding, but like more, can it improve our connections? And because eventually, I'm not quite yet sure that we will succeed, that our thinking is correct. Because there might be reality where having a perfect AI friend still makes us more disconnected from each other and there's no way around it. And does not improve any metrics for us, real metrics, meaningful metrics. So success is, you know, we're happier and more connected. Yeah. I don't know. It's sure it's possible there's a reality that I'm deeply optimistic.

I think are you worried business-wise, like, how difficult it is to bring this thing to life, to where it's, I mean, there's a huge number of people that use it already, but to, yeah, like I said, a multi-billion dollar company. Is that a source of stress for you? Are you a super optimistic and confident? Or do you? I don't, I'm not that much of a numbers person as you probably had seen it. So it doesn't matter for me whether like whether we helped 10,000 people or a million people or a billion people would done. It would be great

to scale it for more people, but I'd say that even helping one, I think, with this is such a magical. For me, it's absolute magic. I never thought that we know would be able to build this, that anyone would ever talk to it. And I always thought like, well, for me, would be successful if we managed to help and actually change a life from one person. Then we did something interesting, and you know, how many people can say they did it, and specifically with this very futuristic, very romantic technology. So that's how I view it. I think it's important to try to figure out

how to actually be helpful. Because in the end of the day, if you can build a perfect AI friend, that's so understanding that knows you better than any human out there, can have great conversations with you always knows how to make you feel better. Why would you choose another human? You know, so that's the question. How do you still keep building it so it's optimizing for the right

thing? So it's still circling you back to other humans in a way. So I think that's the main in a way. So I think that's the main, maybe that's the main kind of source of anxiety and just thinking about that can be a little bit stressful. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing. How to have a friend that doesn't like sometimes like friends quote or like, you know those people who have, when they, like, guide in the guy universe, when you have a girlfriend that you get the girlfriend and then the guy stops hanging out with all of his friends. It's like, obviously, the relationship with the girlfriend is fulfilling or whatever, but like, you also want it be like, she like makes it more enriching to hang out with the guy friends or whatever it was up there. Anyway, that's

a fundamental problem in choosing the right mate and probably the fundamental problem creating the right AI system. What, let me ask the sexy hot thing on the presses right now is GPT-3, got released with OpenAI, it's the latest language model. They have kind of an API where you can create a lot of fun applications. I think it's, as people have said, it's probably more hype than intelligence, but there's a lot of really cool things ideas there With increasing size you can have better and better performance on language What are your thoughts about the GBT3 in connection to your work with the open domain Dialogue but in general like this learning and unsupervised way from the internet to generate one character at a time

creating pretty cool text. So we partnered up before for the API launch. So we started working with them when they decided to put together this API. And we tried it without fine tuning, So we start working with them when they decided to put together this API. And we tried it without fine tuning, that we tried it with fine tuning in our data. And we work closely to actually optimize this model for some of our data sets. It's kind of cool because I think we're this polygon for this kind of experimentation space for experimental space for all these models to see how they actually work with people

because there are no products publicly available to do that. They're focused on open domain conversations so we can test how Facebook Blender doing or how GPT-3 doing. So GPT-3, we managed to improve by a few percentage points, like three or four pretty meaningful amount of percentage points are main metric, which is the ratio of conversation that make people feel better.

And every other metric across the field got a little boost. Right now, I'd say one out of five responses from replica comes from GP3. So our own blender mixes up like a bunch of candidates from different. Blender, you said. Well, yeah, just the model that looks at. Looks at top candidates from different models and then picks the most the best one. So right now one of five will come from G2 3. That is really great. I mean,

what's the do you have hope for like, do you think there's a ceiling to this kind of approach? So we've had for very long time, we've used, since the very beginning, we most, it was, most of replica was scripted and then a little bit of this fallback part of replica was using a retrieval model. And then this retrieval model started getting better and better and better, which transform us a lot better and we're seeing great results. And then with GPT-2, finally, generative models that originally were not very good and were the very, very fallback option for most of our conversations, we wouldn't even put them in production. Finally, we could use some generative models as well along, you know, next to our retrieval models. And then now we do

GPT-3, they're almost in par. So that's pretty exciting, I think just seeing how from the very beginning of, you know, from 2015, where the first models start to pop up here and there, like sequence, sequence, the first papers on that from my observer standpoint, first note, it's not, you know, it doesn't really, is not really building, but it's only testing it on people, basically, and I'm in my product to see how all of a sudden we can use generative dialogue models in production, and they're better than others, and they're better than scripted content. So we can't really get our scripted hard-go-to-content anymore to be as good

as our end-to-end model. That's exciting. Very much better. Yeah. To your question, whether that's the right way to go, I'm again, I'm in the service seat, I'm just watching this very exciting movie. I mean, so far, it's been stupid to bet against deep learning. So whether increasing the size, size of and more, whether 100 trillion parameters will finally get us to the right answer, whether

that's the way or whether there has to be some other, again, I'm definitely not an expert in any way. I think, and that's purely my instinct, saying that there should be something else as well from memory. No, for sure. But the question is, I wonder, I mean, yeah, then the argument is for reasoning or for memory, it might emerge with more parameters in my memory. Larger.

But might emerge, I would never think that, to be honest, maybe in 2017, we've been just experimenting with all the research that has been coming out. Then I felt like we're hitting a wall, that was coming out then, I felt like there's, like, we're hitting a wall, that this should be something completely different. But then transforming models and then just bigger models and then all of a sudden size matters. At that point, it felt like something dramatic needs to happen. But it didn't and just the size, you know, gave us these results that to me are clear indication that we can solve this problem pretty soon.

Did fine tuning help quite a bit? Oh yeah, without it, it wasn't as good. I mean, there is a compelling hope that you don't have to do fine tuning, which is one of the cool things about GBT3 seems to do well without any fine tuning. I guess for specific applications, we still want to train it on a certain, like, add a

little fine tune on like a specific use case, but it's an incredibly impressive thing from my standpoint. And again, I'm not an expert, so I wanted to say that. Yeah, I'm going to. It will be people then. Yeah, I have access to the API, and I'm going to probably do a bunch of fun things with it. I already did some fun things, some videos coming up.

Just the help. I mean, I could be a troll at this point with it. I haven't used the first serious application. So it's really cool to see. You're right. You're able to actually use it with real people and see how well it works.

That's really exciting. Let me ask you, it's another absurd question, but there's a feeling when you interact with replica within the AI system, that there's an entity there. Do you think that entity has to be self-aware? Do you think it has to have consciousness to create a rich experience and an a corollary what is consciousness? I don't know if it does need to have any of those things, but again, because right now, you know, it doesn't have anything, it can

have again a bunch of tricks like that. Are you sure about that? Similarly, I'm not sure. I'll just put it this way, but I't have anything. I can again, a bunch of tricks that simulate. Well, I'm not sure. I'll just put it this way. But I think as long as you can simulate it, if you can feel like you're talking to a robot, a machine that seems to be self-aware, seems to reason well and feels like a person. I think that's enough. And again, what's the goal in order to make people feel better? We might not even need that in the end of a day. What about, so that's one goal.

What about like ethical things about suffering? You know, the moment there's a display of consciousness, we associate consciousness with suffering. There's a temptation to say, well, shouldn't this thing have rights? Shouldn't we not, should we be careful about how we interact with a replica? Like, should it be illegal to torture a replica? Right? All those kinds of things.

Is that, is that, see, I personally believe that that's gonna be a thing. That's a serious thing to think about, but I'm not sure when, but by your smile, I can tell that's not a current concern. But do you think about that kind of stuff? About like suffering and torture and ethical questions about AI systems?

From their perspective, we're talking about long game. I wouldn't torture your AI. Who knows what happens in five to 10 years? Yeah, they'll get you off. I'm not gonna get you back eventually. I'm trying to be as nice as possible and create this ally. Yeah. I think there should be regulation both way in a way.

Like, I don't think it's okay to torture an AI, to be honest. I'm not, I don't think it's okay to yell Alexa to turn on the lights. I think there should be some or just saying kind of nasty. You know, like how kids learn to interact with elax and this kind of mean way, because they just yell at it all the time. I think that's great. I think there should be some feedback loops so that these systems don't train us that it's okay to do that in general. So that if you try to do that, you really get some feedback from the system that it's not okay with that. I mean, that's the most important right now.

Let me ask a question. I think people are curious about when they look at a world class leader and think you're such as yourself. What books, technical, fiction, philosophical, had a big impact on your life, and maybe from another perspective, what books would you recommend others read? So my choice, the three books, right? Three books. My choice is, so the one book that really influenced me a lot

when I was building, starting out this company, maybe 10 years ago, was GEP. Got a lesser buck. And I like everything about it first of all. It's just beautifully written, and it's so old school, and so someone outdated a little bit, but I think the ideas in it about the fact that if you meaningless components can come together in great meaning, we can't even understand. So this emergency thing, I mean complexity, the whole science of complexity, and that beauty, intelligence, all interesting things about this world emerge. Yeah, and the Gaudel theorem theorems and just thinking about like what even these formal systems,

something can be created that we can't quite yet understand. And that from my romantic standpoint was always just, that is why it's important to, maybe I should try to work on these systems and try to build an AI. Yes, I'm not an engineer. Yes, I don't really know how it works. I think that something comes out of it that's you know pure poetry and I know a little bit about that. Something magical comes out of it that we can't quite put a finger on. That's why that book was really fundamental for me. Just for, I don't even know why.

It was just all about this little magic that happens. So that's one, probably the most important book for replica was Carl Rogers on becoming a person. And that's really, and so I think when I think about our company, it's all about there's so many little magical things that happened over the course of working on it. For instance, I mean, the most famous chatbot that we learned about when we started working

on the company was Eliza, which was Wyzenbaum, the MIT professor that built a chatbot that would listen to you and be a therapist. Interpreter, yeah. And I got really inspired to build a replica when I read called Rogers, so I'm become a person, and then I realized that Eliza was mocking called Rogers. It was called Rogers back in the day. But I thought that called Rogers' ideas are they're simple and they're not, you know, they're very

very simple, but they're, they're maybe the most profound thing I've ever learned about human beings. And that's the fact that before Caroders, most therapy was about seeing what's wrong with people and trying to fix it or show them what's wrong with you. And it was all built on the fact that most people are, all people are fundamentally flawed. We have this broken psyche and this is just an therapist's instrument to shed some light on that. And Carl Rogers was different in a way that he finally said that well, it's very important for therapeutic work is to create this therapeutic relationship where you believe fundamentally and inclination to positive growth that everyone deep inside wants to grow positively and change.

And it's super important to create this space and this therapeutic relationship where you give unconditional positive regard deep understanding along someone else to be a separate person full acceptance. And you also try to be as genuine and possible in it as possible in it. And you also try to be as genuine and possible in it, as possible in it. And then for him, that was his own journey of personal growth. And that was back in the 60s. And even that book that is coming from years ago, there's a mention that even machines can potentially do that. And I always felt that creating the space is probably the most, the biggest gift we can give to each other. And that's why the book was fundamental for me personally, because I felt

I want to be learning how to do that in my life. And maybe I can scale it with, you know, with busy-eye systems, and other people can get access to that. So I think our Rogers, it's a pretty dry and a little bit boring book, but I think they did. I do. I think for just for yourself, for as a human, not as an a human. It is just and for him, that was his own path of his own person of growing personally over years, working with people like that.

And so it was work and himself growing, helping other, working with people like that. And so it was work and himself growing, helping other people grow and growing through that. And that's fundamentally what I believe in with our work, helping other people grow, growing ourselves, trying to build a company that's all built on this principles, having a good time, allowing some people to work with to grow a little bit. So these two books and then I would throw in what we have in our office, when we started company in Russia, we put a neon sign in our office because we thought that's a recipe for success. If we do that, we're definitely going to wake up as a multiple-end-door company. It was the Ludwig Wittgenstein

quote, the limit of my language, the limit of my world. What's the quote? The limit of my language, the limit of my world. And I love the Tractatus. I think it's just, it's just a beautiful book by Wittgenstein. Yeah, and I would recommend that to even although he himself didn't believe in that by the end of his lifetime and debunked these ideas But I think I remember once an engineer came in 2012. I think with 13 A friend of ours who worked with us and then went on to work a deep mind and he gave Talk to us about word to back and I saw that I'm like wow, that's You know, they, they wanted

to translate language into, you know, some other representation. And that seems like some, you know, somehow all of that, at some point, I think we'll come into this one, to this one place somehow, it just all feels like different people think about similar ideas and different times from absolutely different perspectives. And that's why I like these books. It's a very interesting limit of our world. We still have that new side. It's very hard to work with this red light in your face. I mean, on the Russian side of things, in terms of language, the

limits of language being a limit of our world, you know, Russian is a beautiful language in some sense. There's wit, there's humor, there's pain, there's so much. We don't have time to talk about how much today, but I'm going to Paris, talk to Dusty Asketol, so translators, I think it's fascinating art. Like, art and engineering, that means it's a certain interesting process. But so from the replica perspective, what do you think about translation, how difficult it is to create a deep, meaningful connection in Russian versus English, how you can translate the two languages. You speak both.

Yeah, I think we're two different people in different languages. Even I'm thinking about, and there's actually some research on that. I looked into that at some point, because I was fascinated by the fact that what I'm talking about with my Russian therapist is nothing to do with what I'm talking about with my English speaking therapist.

To different lives, to different types of conversations to different personas. The main difference between the languages with Russian and English is that Russian, well, English is like a piano. It's a limited number of a lot of different keys, but not too many. And Russians like in Oregon or something, it's just something gigantic with so many different keys and so many different opportunities to screw up and so many opportunities to do something completely tone deaf. It is just a much harder language to use.

It is just a much harder language to use. It has way too much flexibility and way too many tones. What about the entirety of World War II, communism, Stalin, the pain of the people having been deceived by the dream, like all the pain of the, just the entirety of it, Is that in the language too? It's that have to do for sure. I mean, we have words that don't have direct translation that to English that are very much like we have I b did so, which is sort of like to hold like rush or something, but it doesn't have, it doesn't, you don't need to have anyone to do to you.

It's just your state. Yeah. You just feel like that. You feel like the trade by other people, basically, but it's not that. And you can't really translate that. And I think it's super important. There are very many words that are very specific, explain the Russian being. And I think it can only come from a nation that suffered so much and saw institutions

fall time after time after time. And you know, it's exciting, maybe not exciting, exciting the wrong word, but it was interesting about like my generation, my mom's generation, my parents' generation, that we saw institutions fall two or three times in our lifetime. And most Americans have never seen them fall. And they just think that they exist forever. Which is really interesting, but it's definitely a country that suffered so much. And it makes, unfortunately, when I go back and I hang out with my Russian friends,

it makes people very cynical. They stop believing in the future. I hope that's not going to be a case for so long or something's going to change again. But I think seeing institutions follow is a very traumatic experience. It makes it very interesting, do you think, uh, civilizational collapse? See, I'm a very practical person. We're speaking English, so like you said, you're a different person in English and Russian. So in Russian, you might answer that differently, but in English. Well, I'm an optimist and I, I generally believe that there is all, you know, even although the perspectives are green,

there is always a place for a miracle. I mean, it's always been like that with my life. So my life has been, I've been incredibly lucky and things just miracles happen all the time with this company, with people I know, with everything around me. And so, I didn't mention that book, but maybe in search of Miracles, or in search for Miracles, so whatever the English translation for that is, good Russian book to everyone to read. Yeah, I mean, if you put good vibes, if you put love out there in the world, miracles somehow happen. Yeah, I believe that too or at least I believe that. I don't know. Let me ask the most absurd find over Dickie's question of we talked about life a lot. What do you

think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? I mean, my answer is probably going to be pretty cheesy. But I think the state of love is once you feel it. In a way that we've discussed it before, I'm not talking about falling love or... Just love. To yourself, to other people, to something, to the world. That state of bliss that we experience sometimes, whether it's reconnection with ourselves, with our people, the technology. There's something special about those moments. So I would say if anything, that's the only, if it's not for that, then for what else, I would really try to do that. I don't think there's a better way to end it than talking about love. Eugenia, I told you offline that there's something about me that felt

like this. This talking to you you meeting you in person will be a turning point for my life. I know that might be some weirdness to hear, but it's it was a huge honor to talk to you. I hope we talk again. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eugene Yakuita and thank you to our sponsors. Door Dash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars and up a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. The world, the soul'squisite was so much love and moral depth that there's no reason to deceive ourselves with the pretty stories of which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, and our vulnerability is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. Thank you.