back to indexEugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion | Lex Fridman Podcast #121
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The following is a conversation with Eugenia Kuida, cofounder of Replika, which is an app
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that allows you to make friends with an artificial intelligence system, a chatbot, that learns
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to connect with you on an emotional, you could even say a human level, by being a friend.
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For those of you who know my interest in AI and views on life in general, know that Replika
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and Eugenia's line of work is near and dear to my heart.
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The origin story of Replika is grounded in a personal tragedy of Eugenia losing her close
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friend Roman Muzarenki, who was killed crossing the street by a hit and run driver in late
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The app started as a way to grieve the loss of a friend, by trading a chatbot and your
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old net on text messages between Eugenia and Roman.
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The rest is a beautiful human story, as we talk about with Eugenia.
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When a friend mentioned Eugenia's work to me, I knew I had to meet her and talk to her.
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I felt before, during, and after that this meeting would be an important one in my life.
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I think in ways that only time will truly show, to me and others.
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She is a kind and brilliant person.
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It was an honor and a pleasure to talk to her.
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Quick summary of the sponsors, DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App.
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Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that deep, meaningful connection between human beings and artificial
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intelligence systems is a lifelong passion for me.
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I'm not yet sure where that passion will take me, but I decided some time ago that
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I will follow it boldly and without fear, to as far as I can take it.
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With a bit of hard work and a bit of luck, I hope I'll succeed in helping build AI systems
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that have some positive impact on the world and on the lives of a few people out there.
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But also, it is entirely possible that I am in fact one of the chatbots that Eugenia and
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the Replica team have built.
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And this podcast is simply a training process for the neural net that's trying to learn
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to connect to human beings, one episode at a time.
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In any case, I wouldn't know if I was or wasn't, and if I did, I wouldn't tell you.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcast,
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follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle.
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I'll try to make these interesting, but give you timestamps so you can skip, but please
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do still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description to get a discount,
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buy whatever they're selling, it really is the best way to support this podcast.
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This show is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club.
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Try them out with a one time offer for only 5 bucks and free shipping at dollarshave.com
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The starter kit comes with a 6 blade razor, refills, and all kinds of other stuff that
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I first heard about them on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
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And now, friends, we have come full circle.
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It feels like I made it, now that I can do a read for them just like Joe did all those
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years ago, back when he also did ads for some less reputable companies, let's say, that
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you know about if you're a true fan of the old school podcasting world.
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Anyway, I just used the razor and the refills, but they told me I should really try out the
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It's translucent somehow, which is a cool new experience.
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Again, try the Ultimate Shave Starter set today for just 5 bucks plus free shipping
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at dollarshaveclub.com slash lex.
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This show is also sponsored by DoorDash.
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Get $5 off and zero delivery fees on your first order of 15 bucks or more when you download
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the DoorDash app and enter code, you guessed it, LEX.
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I have so many memories of working late nights for a deadline with a team of engineers, whether
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that's for my PhD at Google or MIT, and eventually taking a break to argue about which
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DoorDash restaurant to order from.
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And when the food came, those moments of bonding, of exchanging ideas, of pausing to shift attention
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from the programs to humans were special.
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For a bit of time, I'm on my own now, so I miss that camaraderie, but actually, I still
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use DoorDash a lot.
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Also, it's a great way to support restaurants in these challenging times.
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Once again, download the DoorDash app and enter code LEX to get 5 bucks off and zero
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delivery fees on your first order of 15 dollars or more.
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Finally, this show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store.
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I can truly say that they're an amazing company, one of the first sponsors, if not the first
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sponsor to truly believe in me, and I think quite possibly the reason I'm still doing
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So I am forever grateful to Cash App.
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And as I said many times before, use code LEXBODCAST when you download the app from
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Google Play or the App Store.
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Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with
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as little as one dollar.
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I usually say other stuff here in the read, but I wasted all that time up front saying
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how grateful I am to Cash App.
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I'm going to try to go off the top of my head a little bit more for these reads because
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I'm actually very lucky to be able to choose the sponsors that we take on, and that means
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I can really only take on the sponsors that I truly love, and then I can just talk about
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So it's pretty simple.
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Again, get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play, use code LEXBODCAST, get 10
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bucks, and Cash App will also donate 10 bucks to FIRST, an organization that is helping
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to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world.
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And now, here's my conversation with Eugenia Kuida.
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Okay, before we talk about AI and the amazing work you're doing, let me ask you ridiculously,
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we're both Russian, so let me ask a ridiculously romanticized Russian question.
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Do you think human beings are alone, like fundamentally, on a philosophical level?
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Like in our existence, when we like go through life, do you think just the nature of our
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life is loneliness?
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Yeah, so we have to read Dostoevsky at school, as you probably know, so...
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I mean, it's part of your school program.
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So I guess if you read that, then you sort of have to believe that.
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You're made to believe that you're fundamentally alone, and that's how you live your life.
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How do you think about it?
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You have a lot of friends, but at the end of the day, do you have like a longing for
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connection with other people?
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That's maybe another way of asking it.
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Do you think that's ever fully satisfied?
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I think we are fundamentally alone.
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We're born alone, we die alone, but I view my whole life as trying to get away from that,
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trying to not feel lonely, and again, we're talking about a subjective way of feeling
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It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any connections or you are actually isolated.
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You think it's a subjective thing, but like again, another absurd measurement wise thing,
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how much loneliness do you think there is in the world?
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Like if you see loneliness as a condition, how much of it is there, do you think?
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Like how, I guess how many, you know, there's all kinds of studies and measures of how many
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people in the world feel alone.
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There's all these like measures of how many people are, you know, self report or just
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all these kinds of different measures, but in your own perspective, how big of a problem
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do you think it is size wise?
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I'm actually fascinated by the topic of loneliness.
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I try to read about it as much as I can.
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What really, and I think there's a paradox because loneliness is not a clinical disorder.
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It's not something that you can get your insurance to pay for if you're struggling with that.
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Yet it's actually proven and pretty, you know, tons of papers, tons of research around that.
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It is proven that it's correlated with earlier life expectancy, shorter lifespan.
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And it is, you know, in a way like right now, what scientists would say that it, you know,
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it's a little bit worse than being obese or not actually doing any physical activity in
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In terms of the impact on your health?
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In terms of impact on your physiological health.
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So it's basically puts you, if you're constantly feeling lonely, your body responds like it's
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basically all the time under stress.
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It's always in this alert state and so it's really bad for you because it actually like
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drops your immune system and get it, your response to inflammation is quite different.
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So all the cardiovascular diseases actually responds to viruses.
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So it's much easier to catch a virus.
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That's sad now that we're living in a pandemic and it's probably making us a lot more alone
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and it's probably weakening the immune system, making us more susceptible to the virus.
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The statistics are pretty horrible around that.
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So around 30% of all millennials report that they're feeling lonely constantly.
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And then it's much worse for Gen Z.
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And then 20% of millennials say that they feel lonely and they also don't have any close
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And then I think 25 or so, and then 20% would say they don't even have acquaintances.
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And that's in the United States?
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That's in the United States.
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And I'm pretty sure that that's much worse everywhere else.
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Like in the UK, I mean, it was widely tweeted and posted when they were talking about a
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minister of loneliness that they wanted to appoint because four out of 10 people in the
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Minister of loneliness.
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I think that thing actually exists.
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So yeah, you will die sooner if you are lonely.
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And again, this is only when we're only talking about your perception of loneliness or feeling
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That is not objectively being fully socially isolated.
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However, the combination of being fully socially isolated and not having many connections and
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also feeling lonely, that's pretty much a deadly combination.
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So it strikes me bizarre or strange that this is a wide known fact and then there's really
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no one working really on that because it's like subclinical.
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It's not clinical.
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It's not something that you can, we'll tell your doctor and get a treatment or something.
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Yet it's killing us.
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So there's a bunch of people trying to evaluate, like try to measure the problem by looking
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at like how social media is affecting loneliness and all that kind of stuff.
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So it's like measurement.
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Like if you look at the field of psychology, they're trying to measure the problem and
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not that many people actually, but some.
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But you're basically saying how many people are trying to solve the problem.
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Like how would you try to solve the problem of loneliness?
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Like if you just stick to humans, uh, I mean, or basically not just the humans, but the
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technology that connects us humans.
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Do you think there's a hope for that technology to do the connection?
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Like I, are you on social media much?
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Unfortunately, do you find yourself like, uh, again, if you sort of introspect about
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how connected you feel to other human beings, how not alone you feel, do you think social
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media makes it better or worse maybe for you personally, or in general, I think it's, it's
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easier to look at some stats and, um, I mean, Gen Z seems to be generation Z seems to be
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much lonelier than millennials in terms of how they report loneliness.
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They're definitely the most connected generation in the world.
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I mean, I still remember life without an iPhone, without Facebook, they don't know that that
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ever existed, uh, or at least don't know how it was.
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So that tells me a little bit about the fact that that might be, um, you know, this hyper
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connected world might actually make people feel lonely, lonelier.
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I don't know exactly what the, what the measurements are around that, but I would say, you know,
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my personal experience, I think it does make you feel a lot lonelier, mostly, yeah, we're
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all super connected.
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Uh, but I think loneliness, the feeling of loneliness doesn't come from not having any
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social connections whatsoever.
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Again, tons of people that are, are in longterm relationships experience bouts of loneliness
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and continued loneliness.
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Um, and it's more the question about the true connection about actually being deeply seen,
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deeply understood.
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Um, and in a way it's also about your relationship with yourself, like in order to not feel lonely,
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you actually need to have a better relationship and feel more connected to yourself than this
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feeling actually starts to go away a little bit.
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And then you, um, open up yourself to actually meeting other people in a very special way.
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Uh, not in just, you know, at a friend on Facebook kind of way.
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So just to briefly touch on it, I mean, do you think it's possible to form that kind
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of connection with AI systems more down the line of some of your work?
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Do you think that's, um, engineering wise, a possibility to alleviate loneliness is not
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with another human, but with an AI system?
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Well, I know that's, that's a fact, that's what we're doing.
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And we see it and we measure that and we see how people start to feel less lonely, um,
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talking to their virtual AI friend.
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So basically a chat bot at the basic level, but it could be more like, do you have, I'm
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not even speaking sort of, uh, about specifics, but do you have a hope, like if you look 50
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years from now, do you have a hope that there's just like AIs that are like optimized for,
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um, let me, let me first start like right now, the way people perceive AI, which is
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recommender systems for Facebook and Twitter, social media, they see AI is basically destroying
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first of all, the fabric of our civilization.
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But second of all, making us more lonely.
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Do you see like a world where it's possible to just have AI systems floating about that
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like make our life less lonely?
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Like are putting good things into the world in terms of our individual lives.
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Totally believe in that.
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That's why we're, I'm also working on that.
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Um, I think we need to also make sure that, um, what we're trying to optimize for, we're
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actually measuring and it is a North star metric that we're going after.
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And all of our product and all of our business models are optimized for that because you
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can talk, you know, a lot of products that talk about, um, you know, making you feel
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less lonely or making you feel more connected.
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They're not really measuring that.
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So they don't really know whether their users are actually feeling less lonely in the long
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run or feeling more connected in the long run.
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Um, so I think it's really important to put your measure it.
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What's a, what's a good measurement of loneliness?
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Well, so that's something that I'm really interested in.
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How do you measure that people are feeling better or that they're feeling less lonely
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There's UCLA 20 and UCLA three recently scale, which is basically a questionnaire that you
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fill out and you can see whether in the long run it's improving or not.
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And that, uh, does it capture the momentary feeling of loneliness?
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Does it look in like the past month?
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Like, uh, does it basically self report?
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Does it try to sneak up on you tricky to answer honestly or something like that?
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Well, what's yeah, I'm not familiar with the question.
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It is just asking you a few questions.
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Like how often did you feel, uh, like lonely or how often do you feel connected to other
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people in this last few couple of weeks?
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Um, it's similar to the self report questionnaires for depression, anxiety, like PHQ nine and
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Of course, as any, as any self report questionnaires, that's not necessarily very precise or very
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well measured, but still, if you take a big enough population and you get them through
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these, uh, questionnaires, you can see, you can see a positive dynamic.
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And so you basically, uh, you put people through questionnaires to see like, is this thing
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is our, is what we're creating, making people happier?
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Yeah, we measure, so we measure two outcomes.
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One short term, right after the conversation, we ask people whether this conversation made
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them feel better, worse or same, um, this, this metric right now is at 80%.
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So 80% of all our conversations make people feel better, but I should have done the questionnaire
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You feel a lot worse after we've done this conversation.
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That's actually fascinating.
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I should probably do that, but that's, that's how we do that.
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You should totally and aim for 80% aim to outperform your current state of the art AI
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system in these human conversations.
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So we'll get to your work with replica, but let me continue on the line of absurd questions.
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So you talked about, um, you know, deep connection with the humans, deep connection with AI,
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meaningful connection.
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Let me ask about love.
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People make fun of me cause I talk about love all the time.
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But uh, what, what do you think love is like maybe in the context of, um, a meaningful
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connection with somebody else?
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Do you draw a distinction between love, like friendship and Facebook friends or is it a
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No, it's all the same.
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Like, is it, is it just a gradual thing or is there something fundamental about us humans
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that seek like a really deep connection, uh, with another human being and what is that?
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What is love Eugenia, I'm going to just enjoy asking you these questions seeing you struggle.
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Um, well the way I see it, um, and specifically, um, the way it relates to our work and the
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way it was, the way it inspired our work on replica, um, I think one of the biggest and
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the most precious gifts we can give to each other now in 2020 as humans is this gift of
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deep empathetic understanding, the feeling of being deeply seen.
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Like what does that mean?
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Like that you exist, like somebody acknowledging that somebody seeing you for who you actually
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And that's extremely, extremely rare.
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Um, I think that is that combined with unconditional positive regard, um, belief and trust that
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um, you internally are always inclined for positive growth and believing you in this
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way, letting you be a separate person at the same time.
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And this deep empathetic understanding for me, that's the, that's the combination that
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really creates something special, something that people, when they feel it once, they
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will always long for it again.
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And something that starts huge fundamental changes in people.
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Um, when we see that someone's accepts us so deeply, we start to accept ourselves.
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And um, the paradox is that's when big changes start happening, big fundamental changes in
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people start happening.
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So I think that is the ultimate therapeutic relationship that is, and that might be in
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some way a definition of love.
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So acknowledging that there's a separate person and accepting you for who you are.
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Um, now on a slightly that, and you mentioned therapeutic, that sounds a very, like a very
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healthy view of love, but, uh, is there also like a, like, you know, if we look at heartbreak
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and uh, you know, most love songs are probably about heartbreak, right?
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Is that like the mystery, the tension, the danger, the fear of loss, you know, all of
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that, what people might see in a negative light as like games or whatever, but just,
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just the, the dance of human interaction.
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Fear of loss and fear of like, you said, you said like once you feel it once, you long
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for it again, but you also, once you feel it once, you might, for many people, they've
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So they fear losing it.
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So is that part of it, like you're, you're speaking like beautifully about like the
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positive things, but is it important to be able to, uh, be afraid of losing it from an
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engineering perspective?
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I mean, it's a huge part of it and unfortunately we all, you know, um, face it at some points
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You want to go into details?
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How'd you get your heartbroken?
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So mine is pretty straight, my story is pretty straightforward, um, there I did have a friend
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that was, you know, that at some point, um, in my twenties became really, really close
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to me and we, we became really close friends.
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Um, well, I grew up pretty lonely.
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So in many ways when I'm building, you know, these, these AI friends, I'm thinking about
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myself when I was 17 writing horrible poetry and you know, in my dial up modem at home
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and, um, you know, and that was the feeling that I grew up with.
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I left, I lived, um, alone for a long time when I was a teenager, where did you go up
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in Moscow and the outskirts of Moscow.
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Um, so I'd just skateboard during the day and come back home and you know, connect to
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the internet and then write horrible poetry and love poems, all sorts of poems, obviously
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I mean, what, what other poetry can you write when you're 17, um, it could be political
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or something, but yeah.
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But that was, you know, that was kind of my fiat, like deeply, um, influenced by Joseph
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Brodsky and like all sorts of sports that, um, every 17 year old will, will be looking,
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you know, looking at and reading, but yeah, that was my, uh, these were my teenage years
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and I just never had a person that I thought would, you know, take me as it is, would accept
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me the way I am, um, and I just thought, you know, working and just doing my thing and
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being angry at the world and being a reporter, I was an investigative reporter working undercover
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and writing about people was my way to connect with, you know, with, with others.
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I was deeply curious about every, everyone else.
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And I thought that, you know, if I, if I go out there, if I write their stories, that
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means I'm more connected.
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This is what this podcast as well, by the way, I'm desperate, well, I'm seeking connection
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So what, wait, reporter, uh, what, how did that make you feel more connected?
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I mean, you're still fundamentally pretty alone,
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But you're always with other people, you know, you're always thinking about what other place
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What other community can I write about?
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What other phenomenon can I explore?
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And you sort of like a trickster, you know, and like, and, and a mythological character,
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like creature, that's just jumping, uh, between all sorts of different worlds and feel and
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feel sort of okay with in all of them.
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So, um, that was my dream job, by the way, that was like totally what I would have been
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Um, if Russia was a different place and a little bit undercover.
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So like you weren't, you were trying to, like you said, mythological creature trying to
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So try to be a part of the world.
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What are we talking about?
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What kind of things did you enjoy writing about?
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I'd go work at a strip club or go.
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Well, I'd go work at a restaurant or just go write about, you know, um, certain phenomenons
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or phenomenons or people in the city.
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And what, uh, sorry to keep interrupting and I'm the worst, I'm a conversationalist.
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What stage of Russia is this?
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What, uh, is this pre Putin, post Putin?
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What was Russia like?
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Pre Putin is really long ago.
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This is Putin era.
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That's a beginning of two thousands and 2010, 2007, eight, nine, 10.
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What were strip clubs like in Russia and restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that
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early Russia that you were covering?
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In those early two thousands, this was, there was still a lot of hope.
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There were still tons of hope that, um, you know, we're sort of becoming this, uh, Western,
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Westernized society.
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Uh, the restaurants were opening, we were really looking at, you know, um, we're trying,
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we're trying to copy a lot of things from, uh, from the US, from Europe, um, bringing
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all these things and very enthusiastic about that.
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So there was a lot of, you know, stuff going on.
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There was a lot of hope and dream for this, you know, new Moscow that would be similar
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to, I guess, New York.
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I mean, just to give you an idea in, um, year 2000 was the year when we had two, uh, movie
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theaters in Moscow and there was one first coffee house that opened and it was like really
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Uh, by 2010 there were all sorts of things everywhere.
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Almost like a chain, like a Starbucks type of coffee house or like, you mean, oh yeah,
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I mean, I remember we were reporting on, like, we were writing about the opening of Starbucks.
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I think in 2007 that was one of the biggest things that happened in, you know, in Moscow
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back, back in the time, like, you know, that was worthy of a magazine cover.
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And, uh, that was definitely the, you know, the biggest talk of the time.
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When was McDonald's?
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Cause I was still in Russia when McDonald's opened.
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That was in the nineties.
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I remember that very well.
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Those were long, long lines.
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I think it was 1993 or four, I don't remember.
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Um, actually earlier at that time, did you do, I mean, that was a luxurious outing.
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That was definitely not something you do every day.
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And also the line was at least three hours.
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So if you're going to McDonald's, that is not fast food.
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That is like at least three hours in line and then no one is trying to eat fast after
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Everyone is like trying to enjoy as much as possible.
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What's your memory of that?
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Oh, it was insane.
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It was extremely positive.
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It's a small strawberry milkshake and the hamburger and small fries and my mom's there.
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And sometimes I'll just, cause I was really little, they'll just let me run, you know,
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up the kitchen and like cut the line, which is like, you cannot really do that in Russia
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So like for a lot of people, like a lot of those experiences might seem not very fulfilling,
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you know, like it's on the verge of poverty, I suppose.
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But do you remember all that time fondly, like, cause I do like the first time I drank,
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you know, Coke, you know, all that stuff, right.
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The connection with other human beings in Russia, I remember, I remember it really positively.
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Like how do you remember what the nineties and then the Russia you were covering, just
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the human connections you had with people and the experiences?
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Well, my, my parents were both, both physicists.
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My grandparents were both, well, my grandpa, grandfather was in nuclear physicist, a professor
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at the university.
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My dad worked at Chernobyl when I was born in Chernobyl, analyzing kind of the everything
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after the explosion.
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And then I remember that and they were, so they were making sort of enough money in the
link |
So they were not, you know, extremely poor or anything.
link |
It was pretty prestigious to be a professor, the Dean and the university.
link |
And then I remember my grandfather started making a hundred dollars a month after, you
link |
know, in the nineties.
link |
So then I remember we started our main line of work would be to go to our little tiny
link |
country house, get a lot of apples there from apple trees, bring them back to the city and
link |
sell them in the street.
link |
So me and my nuclear physicist grandfather were just standing there and he selling those
link |
apples the whole day, cause that would make you more money than, you know, working at
link |
And then he'll just tell me, try to teach me, you know, something about planets and
link |
whatever the particles and stuff.
link |
And, you know, I'm not smart at all, so I could never understand anything, but I was
link |
interested as a journalist kind of type interested.
link |
But that was my memory.
link |
And, you know, I'm happy that I wasn't, I somehow got spared that I was probably too
link |
young to remember any of the traumatic stuff.
link |
So the only thing I really remember had this bootleg that was very traumatic, had this
link |
bootleg Nintendo, which was called Dandy in Russia.
link |
So in 1993, there was nothing to eat, like, even if you had any money, you would go to
link |
the store and there was no food.
link |
I don't know if you remember that.
link |
And our friend had a restaurant, like a government, half government owned something restaurant.
link |
So they always had supplies.
link |
So he exchanged a big bag of wheat for this Nintendo, the bootleg Nintendo, that I remember
link |
very fondly, cause I think I was nine or something like that and we're seven.
link |
Like we just got it and I was playing it and there was this, you know, Dandy TV show.
link |
So traumatic in a positive sense, you mean like, like a definitive, well, they took it
link |
away and gave me a bag of wheat instead.
link |
And I cried like my eyes out for days and days and days.
link |
And then, you know, as a, and my dad said, we're going to like exchange it back in a
link |
So you keep the little gun, you know, the one that you shoot the ducks with.
link |
So I'm like, okay, I'm keeping the gun.
link |
So sometime it's going to come back, but then they exchanged the gun as well for some sugar
link |
I was like, I didn't want to eat for days after that.
link |
I'm like, I don't want your food.
link |
Give me my Nintendo back.
link |
That was extremely traumatic.
link |
But you know, I was happy that that was my only traumatic experience.
link |
You know, my dad had to actually go to Chernobyl with a bunch of 20 year olds.
link |
He was 20 when he went to Chernobyl and that was right after the explosion.
link |
No one knew anything.
link |
The whole crew he went with, all of them are dead now.
link |
I think there was this one guy still, that was still alive for this last few years.
link |
I think he died a few years ago now.
link |
My dad somehow luckily got back earlier than everyone else, but just the fact that that
link |
was the, and I was always like, well, how did they send you?
link |
I was only, I was just born, you know, you had a newborn talk about paternity leave.
link |
They were like, but that's who they took because they didn't know whether you would be able
link |
to have kids when you come back.
link |
So they took the ones with kids.
link |
So him with some guys went to, and I'm just thinking of me when I was 20, I was so sheltered
link |
from any problems whatsoever in life.
link |
And then my dad, his 21st birthday at the reactor, you like work three hours a day,
link |
you sleep the rest and, and I, yeah, so I played with a lot of toys from Chernobyl.
link |
What are your memories of Chernobyl in general, like the bigger context, you know, because
link |
of that HBO show it's the world's attention turned to it once again, like, what are your
link |
thoughts about Chernobyl?
link |
Did Russia screw that one up?
link |
Like, you know, there's probably a lot of lessons about our modern times with data about
link |
coronavirus and all that kind of stuff.
link |
It seems like there's a lot of misinformation.
link |
There's a lot of people kind of trying to hide whether they screwed something up or
link |
not, as it's very understandable, it's very human, very wrong, probably, but obviously
link |
Russia was probably trying to hide that they screwed things up.
link |
Like, what are your thoughts about that time, personal and general?
link |
I mean, I was born when the explosion happened.
link |
So actually a few months after, so of course I don't remember anything apart from the fact
link |
that my dad would bring me tiny toys, like plastic things that would just go crazy haywire
link |
when you, you know, put the Geiger thing to it.
link |
My mom was like, just nuclear about that.
link |
She was like, what are you bringing, you should not do that.
link |
It was, but yeah, but the TV show was just phenomenal.
link |
Yeah, it was definitely, first of all, it's incredible how that was made not by the Russians,
link |
but someone else, but capturing so well everything about our country.
link |
It felt a lot more genuine than most of the movies and TV shows that are made now in Russia,
link |
just so much more genuine.
link |
And most of my friends in Russia were just in complete awe about the show, but I think
link |
How good of a job they did.
link |
Oh my God, phenomenal.
link |
The apartments, there's something, yeah.
link |
I mean, Russians can't do that, you know, but you see everything and it's like, wow,
link |
that's exactly how it was.
link |
So I don't know, that show, I don't know what to think about that because it's British accents,
link |
British actors of a person, I forgot who created the show.
link |
But I remember reading about him and he's not, he doesn't even feel like, like there's
link |
no Russia in this history.
link |
No, he did like super bad or something like that.
link |
Or like, I don't know.
link |
Yeah, like exactly.
link |
Whatever that thing about the bachelor party in Vegas, number four and five or something
link |
were the ones that he worked with.
link |
But so he made me feel really sad for some reason that if a person, obviously a genius,
link |
could go in and just study and just be extreme attention to detail, they can do a good job.
link |
It made me think like, why don't other people do a good job with this?
link |
Like about Russia, like there's so little about Russia.
link |
There's so few good films about the Russian side of World War II.
link |
I mean, there's so much interesting evil and not, and beautiful moments in the history
link |
of the 20th century in Russia that it feels like there's not many good films on from the
link |
You would expect something from the Russians.
link |
Well, they keep making these propaganda movies now.
link |
But yeah, no, Chernobyl was such a perfect TV show.
link |
I think capturing really well, it's not about like even the set design, which was phenomenal,
link |
but just capturing all the problems that exist now with the country and like focusing on
link |
Like if you build the whole country on a lie, that's what's going to happen.
link |
And that's just this very simple kind of thing.
link |
And did you have your dad talked about it to you, like his thoughts on the experience?
link |
He's this kind of Russian man that just, my husband who's American and he asked him a
link |
few times like, you know, Igor, how did you, but why did you say yes?
link |
Or like, why did you decide to go?
link |
You could have said no, not go to Chernobyl.
link |
Why would like a person like, that's what you do.
link |
You cannot say no.
link |
It's just, it's like a Russian way.
link |
It's the Russian way.
link |
Men don't talk that much.
link |
There's no one upsides for that.
link |
Yeah, that's the truth.
link |
So back to post Putin Russia, or maybe we skipped a few steps along the way, but you
link |
were trying to do, to be a journalist in that time.
link |
What was, what was Russia like at that time?
link |
Post you said 2007 Starbucks type of thing.
link |
What else, what else was Russia like then?
link |
I think there was just hope.
link |
There was this big hope that we're going to be, you know, friends with the United States
link |
and we're going to be friends with Europe and we're just going to be also a country
link |
like those with, you know, bike lanes and parks and everything's going to be urbanized.
link |
And again, we're talking about nineties where like people would be shot in the street.
link |
And it was, I still have a fond memory of going into a movie theater and, you know,
link |
coming out of it after the movie.
link |
And the guy that I saw on the stairs was like neither shot, which was, again, it was like
link |
a thing in the nineties that would be happening.
link |
People were, you know, people were getting shot here and there, tons of violence, tons
link |
of you know, just basically mafia mobs on in the streets.
link |
And then the two thousands were like, you know, things just got cleaned up, oil went
link |
up and the country started getting a little bit richer, you know, the nineties were so
link |
grim mostly because the economy was in shambles and oil prices were not high.
link |
So the country didn't have anything.
link |
We defaulted in 1998 and the money kept jumping back and forth.
link |
Like first there were millions of rubbles, then it got like default, you know, then it
link |
got to like thousands.
link |
Then it was one rubble was something then again to millions, there's like crazy town.
link |
And then the two thousands were just these years of stability in a way and the country
link |
getting a little bit richer because of, you know, again, oil and gas.
link |
And we were starting to, we started to look at specifically in Moscow and St. Petersburg
link |
to look at other cities in Europe and New York and US and trying to do the same in our
link |
like small kind of cities, towns there.
link |
What was, what were your thoughts of Putin at the time?
link |
Well, in the beginning he was really positive.
link |
Everyone was very, you know, positive about Putin.
link |
Um, it's very energetic.
link |
He also immediate the shirtless somewhat compared to, well, that was not like way before the
link |
Um, the shirtless era.
link |
So he didn't start out shirtless.
link |
When did the shirtless era, it's like the propaganda of riding horse, fishing, 2010,
link |
That's my favorite.
link |
You know, like people talk about the favorite Beatles, like the, that's my favorite Putin
link |
is the shirtless Putin.
link |
Now I remember very, very clearly 1996 where, you know, Americans really helped Russia with
link |
elections and Yeltsin got reelected, um, thankfully so, uh, because there's a huge threat that
link |
actually the communists will get back to power.
link |
Uh, they were a lot more popular.
link |
And then a lot of American experts, political experts, uh, and campaign experts descended
link |
on Moscow and helped Yeltsin actually get, get the presidency, the second term for the
link |
pro, um, the, of the presidency.
link |
But Yeltsin was not feeling great, you know, in the, by the end of his second term, uh,
link |
he was, you know, alcoholic.
link |
He was really old.
link |
He was falling off, uh, you know, the stages when he, where he was talking.
link |
Uh, so people were looking for fresh, I think for a fresh face, for someone who's going
link |
to continue Yeltsin's, uh, work, but who's going to be a lot more energetic and a lot
link |
more active, young, um, efficient, maybe.
link |
So that w that's what we all saw in Putin back in the day.
link |
I, I'd say that everyone, absolutely everyone in Russia in early two thousands who was not
link |
a communist would be, yeah, Putin's great.
link |
We have a lot of hopes for him.
link |
What are your thoughts?
link |
And I promise we'll get back to, uh, first of all, your love story.
link |
Second of all, AI, well, what are your thoughts about, um, communism?
link |
The 20th century, I apologize.
link |
I'm reading the rise and fall of the third Reich.
link |
So I'm like really steeped into like world war II and Stalin and Hitler and just these
link |
dramatic personalities that brought so much evil to the world.
link |
But it's also interesting to politically think about these different systems and what they've
link |
And Russia is one of the sort of beacons of communism in the 20th century.
link |
What are your thoughts about communism?
link |
Having experienced it as a political system?
link |
I mean, I have only experienced it a little bit, but mostly through stories and through,
link |
you know, seeing my parents and my grandparents who lived through that, I mean, it was horrible.
link |
It was just plain horrible.
link |
It was just awful.
link |
You think it's, there's something, I mean, it sounds nice on paper.
link |
There's a, so like the drawbacks of capitalism is that, uh, you know, eventually there is,
link |
it's a, it's the point of like a slippery slope.
link |
Eventually it creates, uh, you know, the rich get richer, it creates a disparity, like inequality
link |
of, um, wealth inequality.
link |
If like, you know, I guess it's hypothetical at this point, but eventually capitalism leads
link |
to humongous inequality and that that's, you know, some people argue that that's a source
link |
of unhappiness is it's not like absolute wealth of people.
link |
It's the fact that there's a lot of people much richer than you.
link |
There's a feeling of like, that's where unhappiness can come from.
link |
So the idea of, of communism or these sort of Marxism is, uh, is, is not allowing that
link |
kind of slippery slope, but then you see the actual implementations of it and stuff seems
link |
to be, seems to go wrong very badly.
link |
What do you think that is?
link |
Why does it go wrong?
link |
What is it about human nature?
link |
If we look at Chernobyl, you know, those kinds of bureaucracies that were constructed.
link |
Is there something like, do you think about this much of like why it goes wrong?
link |
Well, there's no one was really like, it's not that everyone was equal.
link |
Obviously the, you know, the, the government and everyone close to that were the bosses.
link |
So it's not like fully, I guess, uh, this dream of equal life.
link |
So then I guess the, the situation that we had in, you know, the Russia had in the Soviet
link |
union, it was more, it's a bunch of really poor people without any way to make any, you
link |
know, significant fortune or build anything living constant, um, under constant surveillance,
link |
surveillance from other people.
link |
Like you can't even, you know, uh, do anything that's not fully approved by the dictatorship
link |
Otherwise your neighbor will write a letter and you'll go to jail, absolute absence of
link |
It's a constant state of fear.
link |
You didn't own any, own anything.
link |
It didn't, you know, the, you couldn't go travel, you couldn't read anything, uh, Western
link |
or you couldn't make a career really, unless you're working in the, uh, military complex.
link |
Um, which is why most of the scientists were so well regarded.
link |
I come from, you know, both my dad and my mom come from families of scientists and they,
link |
they were really well regarded as you, as you know, obviously.
link |
Because the state wanted, I mean, cause there's a lot of value to them being well regarded.
link |
Because they were developing things that could be used in, in the military.
link |
So that was very important.
link |
That was the main investment.
link |
Um, but it was miserable, it was all miserable.
link |
That's why, you know, a lot of Russians now live in the state of constant PTSD.
link |
That's why we, you know, want to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy and definitely if as soon as
link |
we have the opportunity, you know, we just got to it finally that we can, you know, own
link |
You know, I remember the time that we got our first yogurts and that was the biggest
link |
deal in the world.
link |
It was already in the nineties, by the way, I mean, what was your like, favorite food
link |
where it was like, well, like this is possible, Oh, fruit, because we only had apples, bananas
link |
And you know, whatever watermelons, whatever, you know, people would grow in the Soviet
link |
There were no pineapples or papaya or mango, like you've never seen those fruit things.
link |
Like those were so ridiculously good.
link |
And obviously you could not get any like strawberries in winter or anything that's not, you know,
link |
Um, so that was a really big deal.
link |
I've seen all these fruit things.
link |
I think I have a, like, I don't think I have any too many demons, uh, or like addictions
link |
or so on, but I think I've developed an unhealthy relationship with fruit.
link |
I still struggle with, Oh, you can get any type of fruit, right?
link |
If you get like also these weird fruit, fruits like dragon fruit or something or all kinds
link |
of like different types of peaches, like cherries were killer for me.
link |
I know, I know you say like we had bananas and so on, but I don't remember having the
link |
Like when I first came to this country, the amount of banana, I like literally got fat
link |
on bananas, like the amount, Oh yeah, for sure.
link |
They were delicious.
link |
And like cherries, the kind, like just the quality of the food, I was like, this is capitalism.
link |
This is delicious.
link |
Like it's, it's funny to read.
link |
I don't know what to think of it, of, um, it's funny to think how an idea that's just
link |
written on paper, when carried out amongst millions of people, how that gets actually
link |
when it becomes reality, what it actually looks like, uh, sorry, but the, uh, been studying
link |
Hitler a lot recently and, uh, going through Mein Kampf.
link |
He pretty much wrote out of Mein Kampf everything he was going to do.
link |
Unfortunately, most leaders, including Stalin didn't read the, read it, but it's, it's kind
link |
of terrifying and I don't know.
link |
And amazing in some sense that you can have some words on paper and they can be brought
link |
to life and they can either inspire the world or they can destroy the world.
link |
And uh, yeah, there's a lot of lessons to study in history that I think people don't
link |
One of the things I'm hoping with, I've been practicing Russian a little bit.
link |
I'm hoping to sort of find, rediscover the, uh, the beauty and the terror of Russian history
link |
through this stupid podcast by talking to a few people.
link |
So anyway, I just feel like so much was forgotten.
link |
So much was forgotten.
link |
I'll probably, I'm going to try to convince myself to, um, you're a super busy and super
link |
important person when I'm going to, I'm going to try to befriend you to, uh, to try to become
link |
Cause I feel like I'm a shitty Russian.
link |
So I can totally be your Russian Sherpa.
link |
But love, you were, you were talking about your early days of, uh, being a little bit
link |
alone and finding a connection with the world through being a journalist.
link |
Where did love come into that?
link |
I guess finding for the first time, um, some friends, it's very, you know, simple story.
link |
Some friends that all of a sudden we, I guess we were the same, you know, the same, at the
link |
same place with our lives, um, we're 25, 26, I guess.
link |
And, um, somehow remember, and we just got really close and somehow remember this one
link |
day where, um, it's one day and, you know, in summer that we just stayed out, um, outdoor
link |
the whole night and just talked and for some unknown reason, it just felt for the first
link |
time that someone could, you know, see me for who I am and it just felt extremely like
link |
And I, you know, we fell asleep outside and just talking and it was raining.
link |
It was beautiful, you know, sunrise and it's really cheesy, but, um, at the same time,
link |
we just became friends in a way that I've never been friends with anyone else before.
link |
And I do remember that before and after that you sort of have this unconditional family
link |
sort of, um, and it gives you tons of power.
link |
It just basically gives you this tremendous power to do things in your life and to, um,
link |
change positively on many different levels.
link |
Power because you could be yourself.
link |
At least you know that some somewhere you can be just yourself, like you don't need
link |
to pretend, you don't need to be, you know, um, great at work or tell some story or sell
link |
yourself in somewhere or another.
link |
And so it became this really close friends and, um, in a way, um, I started a company
link |
cause he had a startup and I felt like I kind of want to start up too.
link |
It felt really cool.
link |
I don't know what I'm going to, what I would really do, but I felt like I kind of need
link |
So that's, so that pulled you in to the startup world.
link |
And then this, uh, closest friend of mine died.
link |
We actually moved here to San Francisco together and then we went back for a visa to Moscow
link |
and, uh, we lived together, we're roommates and we came back and, um, he got hit by a
link |
car right in front of Kremlin on a, you know, next to the river, um, and died the same day
link |
I met this is the Roman hospital.
link |
So, and you've moved to America at that point, at that point I was, what about him?
link |
He actually moved first.
link |
So I was always sort of trying to do what he was doing, so I didn't like that he was
link |
already here and I was still, you know, in Moscow and we weren't hanging out together
link |
So was he in San Francisco?
link |
Yeah, we were roommates.
link |
So he just visited Moscow for a little bit.
link |
We went back for, for our visas, we had to get a stamp in our passport for our work visas
link |
and the embassy was taking a little longer, so we stayed there for a couple of weeks.
link |
How did he, so how, how did he, uh, how did he die?
link |
Um, he was crossing the street and the car was going really fast and way over the speed
link |
limit and just didn't stop on the, on the pedestrian cross on the zebra and just ran
link |
It was in 2015 on 28th of November, so it was a long ago now.
link |
Um, but at the time, you know, I was 29, so for me it was, um, the first kind of meaningful
link |
Um, you know, both sets of, I had both sets of grandparents at the time.
link |
I didn't see anyone so close die and death sort of existed, but as a concept, but definitely
link |
not as something that would be, you know, happening to us anytime soon and specifically
link |
Cause we were, you know, we're still in our twenties or early thirties and it still, it
link |
still felt like the whole life is, you know, you could still dream about ridiculous things
link |
Um, so that was, it was just really, really abrupt I'd say.
link |
What did it feel like to, uh, to lose him, like that feeling of loss?
link |
You talked about the feeling of love, having power.
link |
What is the feeling of loss, if you like?
link |
Well in Buddhism, there's this concept of Samaya where something really like huge happens
link |
and then you can see very clearly.
link |
Um, I think that, that was it like basically something changed so, changed me so much in
link |
such a short period of time that I could just see really, really clearly what mattered or
link |
Well, I definitely saw that whatever I was doing at work didn't matter at all and some
link |
And, um, it was just this big realization when it's this very, very clear vision of
link |
what life's about.
link |
You still miss him today?
link |
He was just this constant, I think it was, he was really important for, for me and for
link |
our friends for many different reasons and, um, I think one of them being that we didn't
link |
just say goodbye to him, but we sort of said goodbye to our youth in a way.
link |
It was like the end of an era and it's on so many different levels.
link |
The end of Moscow as we knew it, the end of, you know, us living through our twenties and
link |
kind of dreaming about the future.
link |
Do you remember like last several conversations, is there moments with him that stick out that
link |
kind of haunt you and you're just when you think about him?
link |
Yeah, well his last year here in San Francisco, he was pretty depressed for as his startup
link |
was not going really anywhere and he wanted to do something else.
link |
He wanted to do build, he played with toy, like played with a bunch of ideas, but the
link |
last one he had was around, um, building a startup around death.
link |
So having, um, he applied to Y Combinator with a video that, you know, I had on my computer
link |
and it was all about, you know, disrupting death, thinking about new cemeteries, uh,
link |
more biologically, like things that could be better biologically for, for humans.
link |
And at the same time, having those, um, digital avatars, this kind of AI avatars that would
link |
store all the memory about a person that he could interact with.
link |
What year was this?
link |
Well, right before his death.
link |
So it was like a couple of months before that he recorded that video.
link |
And so I found out my computer when, um, it was in our living room.
link |
He never got in, but, um, he was thinking about a lot somehow.
link |
Does it have the digital avatar idea?
link |
That's so interesting.
link |
Well, he just says, well, that's in his hit is the pitch has this idea and he'll, he talks
link |
about like, I want to rethink how people grieve and how people talk about death.
link |
Why was he interested in this?
link |
Is it, maybe someone who's depressed is like naturally inclined thinking about that.
link |
But I just felt, you know, this year in San Francisco, we just had so much, um, I was
link |
going through a hard time.
link |
And we were definitely, I was trying to make him just happy somehow to make him feel better.
link |
And it felt like, you know, this, um, I dunno, I just felt like I was taking care of him
link |
a lot and he almost started to feel better.
link |
And then that happened and I dunno, I just felt, I just felt lonely again, I guess.
link |
And that was, you know, coming back to San Francisco in December or help, you know, helped
link |
organize the funeral, help help his parents and I came back here and it was a really lonely
link |
apartment, a bunch of his clothes everywhere and Christmas time.
link |
And I remember I had a board meeting with my investors and I just couldn't talk about
link |
like, I had to pretend everything's okay.
link |
And you know, I'm just working on this company.
link |
Um, yeah, it was definitely very, very tough, tough time.
link |
Do you think about your own mortality?
link |
You said, uh, you know, we're young, the, the, the, the possibility of doing all kinds
link |
of crazy things is still out there, is still before us, but, uh, it can end any moment.
link |
Do you think about your own ending at any moment?
link |
Unfortunately, I think about way too, about it way too much.
link |
Somehow after Roman, like every year after that, I started losing people that I really
link |
I lost my grandfather the next year, my, you know, the, the person who would explain to
link |
me, you know, what the universe is made of while selling apples and then I lost another
link |
close friend of mine and, um, and it just made me very scared.
link |
I have tons of fear about, about that.
link |
That's what makes me not fall asleep oftentimes and just go in loops and, um, and then as
link |
my therapist, you know, recommended to me, I open up, uh, some nice calming images with
link |
the voiceover and it calms me down for sleep.
link |
I'm really scared of death.
link |
This is a big, I definitely have tons of, I guess, some pretty big trauma about it and,
link |
um, still working through.
link |
There's a philosopher, Ernest Becker, who wrote a book, um, Denial of Death.
link |
I'm not sure if you're familiar with any of those folks.
link |
Um, there's a, in psychology, a whole field called terror management theory.
link |
Sheldon, who's just done the podcast, he wrote the book.
link |
He was the, we talked for four hours about death, uh, fear of death, but his, his whole
link |
idea is that, um, Ernest Becker, I think I find this idea really compelling is, uh, that
link |
everything human beings have created, like our whole motivation in life is to, uh, create
link |
like escape death is to try to, um, construct an illusion of, um, that we're somehow immortal.
link |
So like everything around us, this room, your startup, your dreams, all everything you do
link |
is a kind of, um, creation of a brain unlike any other mammal or species is able to be
link |
cognizant of the fact that it ends for us.
link |
I think, so, you know, there's this, the question of like the meaning of life that, you know,
link |
you look at like what drives us, uh, humans.
link |
And when I read Ernest Becker that I highly recommend people read is the first time I,
link |
this scene, it felt like this is the right thing at the core.
link |
Uh, Sheldon's work is called warm at the core.
link |
So he's saying it's, I think it's, uh, William James he's quoting or whoever is like the,
link |
the thing, what is at the core of it all?
link |
Whether there's like love, you know, Jesus might talk about like love is at the core
link |
I don't, you know, that's the open question.
link |
What's at the, you know, it's turtles, turtles, but it can't be turtles all the way down.
link |
What's what's at the, at the bottom.
link |
And, uh, Ernest Becker says the fear of death and the way, in fact, uh, cause you said therapist
link |
and calming images, his whole idea is, um, you know, we, we want to bring that fear of
link |
death as close as possible to the surface because it's, um, and like meditate on that.
link |
Uh, and, and use the clarity of vision that provides to, uh, you know, to live a more
link |
fulfilling life, to, um, to live a more honest life, to, to discover, you know, there's something
link |
about, you know, being cognizant of the finiteness of it all that might result in, um, in the
link |
most fulfilling life.
link |
So that's the, that's the dual of what you're saying.
link |
Cause you kind of said, it's like, I unfortunately think about it too much.
link |
It's a question whether it's good to think about it because I, I've, um, again, I talk
link |
about way too much about love and probably death.
link |
And when I ask people, friends, which is why I probably don't have many friends, are you
link |
I think most people say they're not.
link |
Whether they say they're, um, they're afraid, you know, it's kind of almost like they see
link |
death as this kind of like, uh, a paper deadline or something.
link |
And they're afraid not to finish the paper before the paper, like, like I'm afraid not
link |
to finish, um, the goals I have, but it feels like they're not actually realizing that this
link |
thing ends, like really realizing, like really thinking as Nietzsche and all these philosophy,
link |
like thinking deeply about it, like, uh, the very thing that, you know, um, like when you
link |
think deeply about something, you can just, you can realize that you haven't actually
link |
And I, and when I think about death, it's like, um, it can be, it's terrifying.
link |
If it feels like stepping outside into the cold or it's freezing and then I have to like
link |
hurry back inside or it's warm.
link |
Uh, but like, I think there's something valuable about stepping out there into the freezing
link |
When I talk to my mentor about it, he always, uh, tells me, well, what dies?
link |
There's nothing there that can die, but I guess that requires, um, well in, in Buddhism,
link |
one of the concepts that are really hard to grasp and that people spend all their lives
link |
meditating on would be Anatta, which is the concept of non, not self and kind of thinking
link |
that, you know, if you're not your thoughts, which you're obviously not your thoughts because
link |
you can observe them and not your emotions and not your body, then what is this?
link |
And if you go really far, then finally you see that there's not self, there's this concept
link |
So once you get there, how can that actually die?
link |
You're just a bunch of molecules, stardust.
link |
But that is very, um, you know, very advanced, um, spiritual work for me.
link |
I'm definitely just, definitely not.
link |
No, I have, uh, I think it's very, very useful.
link |
It's just the fact that maybe being so afraid is not useful and mine is more, I'm just terrified.
link |
Like it's really makes me, um,
link |
On a personal level.
link |
On a personal level.
link |
How do you overcome that?
link |
I'm still trying to.
link |
Have pleasant images?
link |
Well, pleasant images get me to sleep and then during the day I can distract myself with
link |
other things, like talking to you.
link |
I'm glad we're both doing the same exact thing.
link |
Is there other, like, is there moments since you've, uh, lost Roman that you had like moments
link |
of like bliss and like that you've forgotten that you have achieved that Buddhist like
link |
level of like what can possibly die.
link |
I'm part like, uh, losing yourself in the moment, in the ticking time of like this universe
link |
and you're just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it.
link |
Well that goes hand in hand.
link |
I remember I think a day or two after he died, we went to finally get his password out of
link |
the embassy and we're driving around Moscow and it was, you know, December, which is usually
link |
there's never a sun in Moscow in December and somehow it was an extremely sunny day
link |
and we were driving with a close friend.
link |
And I remember feeling for the first time maybe this just moment of incredible clarity
link |
and somehow happiness, not like happy happiness, but happiness and just feeling that, you know,
link |
I know what the universe is sort of about, whether it's good or bad.
link |
And it wasn't a sad feeling.
link |
It was probably the most beautiful feeling that you can ever achieve.
link |
And you can only get it when something, oftentimes when something traumatic like that happens.
link |
But also if you just, you really spend a lot of time meditating and looking at the nature
link |
doing something that really gets you there.
link |
But once you're there, I think when you, uh, summit a mountain, a really hard mountain,
link |
you inevitably get there.
link |
That's just a way to get to the state.
link |
But once you're on this, in this state, um, you can do really big things.
link |
Sucks it doesn't last forever.
link |
So Bukowski talked about like, love is a fog.
link |
Like it's a, when you wake up in the morning, it's, it's there, but it eventually dissipates.
link |
Nothing lasts forever.
link |
But I definitely like doing this pushup and running thing.
link |
There's moments at a couple of moments, like I'm not a crier.
link |
But there's moments where I was like facedown on the carpet, like with tears in my eyes
link |
And then that, that complete, like, uh, there's a lot of demons.
link |
I've got demons had to face them.
link |
Funny how running makes you face your demons.
link |
But at the same time, the flip side of that, there's a few moments where I was in bliss
link |
and all of it alone, which is funny.
link |
I like that, but definitely pushing yourself physically one of it for sure.
link |
Like you said, I mean, you were speaking as a metaphor of Mount Everest, but it also works
link |
like literally, I think physical endeavor somehow.
link |
There's something.
link |
I mean, we're monkeys, apes, whatever physical, there's a physical thing to it, but there's
link |
something to this pushing yourself physical, physically, but alone that happens when you're
link |
doing like things like you do or strenuous like workouts or, you know, rolling extra
link |
across the Atlantic or like marathons.
link |
I love watching marathons and you know, it's so boring, but you can see them getting there.
link |
So the other thing, I don't know if you know, there's a guy named David Goggins.
link |
He's a, he basically, uh, so he's been either email on the phone with me every day through
link |
I haven't been exactly alone, but he, he's kind of, he's the, he's the devil on the devil's
link |
Uh, so he's like the worst possible human being in terms of giving you, uh, like he
link |
has, um, through everything I've been doing, he's been doubling everything I do.
link |
So he, he's insane.
link |
Uh, he's a, this Navy seal person.
link |
Uh, he's wrote this book.
link |
He's basically one of the toughest human beings on earth.
link |
He ran all these crazy ultra marathons in the desert.
link |
He set the world record number of pull ups.
link |
He just does everything where it's like, he, like, how can I suffer today?
link |
He figures that out and does it.
link |
That, um, whatever that is, uh, that process of self discovery is really important.
link |
I actually had to turn myself off from the internet mostly because I started this like
link |
workout thing, like a happy go getter with my like headband and like, just like, uh,
link |
because a lot of people were like inspired and they're like, yeah, we're going to exercise
link |
And I was like, yeah, great.
link |
You know, but then like, I realized that this, this journey can't be done together with others.
link |
This has to be done alone.
link |
So out of the moments of love, out of the moments of loss, can we, uh, talk about your
link |
journey of finding, I think, an incredible idea and incredible company and incredible
link |
system in Replica?
link |
How did that come to be?
link |
So yeah, so I was a journalist and then I went to business school for a couple of years
link |
to, um, just see if I can maybe switch gears and do something else with 23.
link |
And then I came back and started working for a businessman in Russia who built the first
link |
ROG network, um, in our country and was very visionary and asked me whether I want to do
link |
fun stuff together.
link |
Um, and we worked on a bank, um, the idea was to build a bank on top of, um, a telco.
link |
So that was 2011 or 12, um, and a lot of telecommunication company, um, mobile network operators didn't
link |
really know what to do next in terms of, you know, new products, new revenue.
link |
And this big idea was that, you know, um, you put a bank on top and then all work works
link |
Basically a prepaid account becomes your bank account and, um, you can use it as, as your
link |
Uh, so, you know, a third of a country wakes up as, as your bank client.
link |
Um, but we couldn't quite figure out what, what would be the main interface to interact
link |
The problem was that most people didn't have smart, smart phones back in the time in Russia,
link |
the penetration of smartphones was low, um, people didn't use mobile banking or online
link |
banking and their computers.
link |
So we figured out that SMS would be the best way, uh, cause that would work on feature
link |
Um, but that required some chat bot technology, which I didn't know anything about, um, obviously.
link |
So I started looking into it and saw that there's nothing really, well, there wasn't
link |
just nothing really.
link |
Ideas through SMS be able to interact with your bank account.
link |
And then we thought, well, since you're talking to a bank account, why can't this, can't we
link |
use more of, uh, you know, some behavioral ideas and why can't this, uh, banking chat
link |
bot be nice to you and really talk to you sort of as a friend this way you develop more
link |
connection to it, retention is higher, people don't churn.
link |
And so I went to very depressing, um, um, Russian cities to test it out.
link |
Um, I went to, I remember three different towns with, uh, um, to interview potential
link |
Um, so people use it for a little bit and I went to talk to them, um, very poor towns,
link |
mostly towns that were, um, you know, sort of factories, uh, mono towns.
link |
They were building something and then the factory went away and it was just a bunch
link |
of very poor people.
link |
Um, and then we went to a couple that weren't as dramatic, but still the one I remember
link |
really fondly was this woman that worked at a glass factory and she talked to a chat bot.
link |
Um, and she was talking about it and she started crying during the interview because she said,
link |
no one really cares for me that much.
link |
And um, so to be clear, that was the, my only endeavor in programming that chat bot.
link |
So it was really simple.
link |
It was literally just a few, if this, then that rules and, um, it was incredibly simplistic.
link |
Um, and that really made her emotional and she said, you know, I only have my mom and
link |
my, um, my husband and I don't have any more really in my life.
link |
And that was very sad, but at the same time I felt, and we had more interviews in a similar
link |
vein and what I thought in the moment was like, well, uh, it's not that the technology
link |
is ready because definitely in 2012 technology was not ready for, for that, but, um, humans
link |
are ready, unfortunately.
link |
So this project would not be about like tech capabilities would be more about human vulnerabilities,
link |
but, um, there's something so, so powerful around about conversational, um, AI that I
link |
saw then that I thought was definitely worth putting in a lot of effort into.
link |
So in the end of the day, we saw the banking project, um, but my then boss, um, was also
link |
my mentor and really, really close friend, um, told me, Hey, I think there's something
link |
in it and you should just go work on it.
link |
And I was like, well, what product?
link |
I don't know what I'm building.
link |
He's like, you'll figure it out.
link |
And, um, you know, looking back at this, this was a horrible idea to work on something without
link |
knowing what it was, which is maybe the reason why it took us so long, but we just decided
link |
to work on the conversational tech to see what it, you know, there were no chat bot,
link |
um, constructors or programs or anything that would allow you to actually build one at the
link |
Uh, that was the era of, by the way, Google glass, which is why, you know, some of the
link |
investors like seed investors we've talked with were like, Oh, you should totally build
link |
it for Google glass.
link |
If not, we're not, I don't think that's interesting.
link |
Did you bite on that idea?
link |
Because I wanted to be, to do text first cause I'm a journalist.
link |
So I was, um, fascinated by just texting.
link |
So you thought, so the emotional, um, that interaction that the woman had, like, so do
link |
you think you could feel emotion from just text?
link |
I saw something in just this pure texting and also thought that we should first start,
link |
start building for people who really need it versus people who have Google glass.
link |
Uh, if you know what I mean, and I felt like the early adopters of Google glass might not
link |
be overlapping with people who are really lonely and might need some, you know, someone
link |
Um, but then we really just focused on the tech itself.
link |
We just thought, what if we just, you know, we didn't have a product idea in the moment
link |
and we felt, what if we just look into, um, building the best conversational constructors,
link |
so to say, use the best tech available at the time.
link |
And that was before the first paper about deep learning applied to dialogues, which
link |
happened in 2015 in August, 2015, uh, which Google published.
link |
Did you follow the work of Lobna prize and like all the sort of non machine learning
link |
What really struck me was that, you know, there was a lot of talk about machine learning
link |
and deep learning.
link |
Like big data was a really big thing.
link |
Everyone was saying, you know, the business world, big data, 2012 is the biggest gaggle
link |
competitions were, you know, um, important, but that was really the kind of upheaval.
link |
People started talking about machine learning a lot, um, but it was only about images or
link |
And it was never about conversation.
link |
As soon as I looked into the conversational tech, it was all about something really weird
link |
and very outdated and very marginal and felt very hobbyist.
link |
It was all about Lord burner price, which was won by a guy who built a chat bot that
link |
talked like a Ukrainian teenager that it was just a gimmick.
link |
And somehow people picked up those gimmicks and then, you know, the most famous chat bot
link |
at the time was Eliza from 1980s, which was really bizarre or smarter child on aim.
link |
The funny thing is it felt at the time not to be that popular and it still doesn't seem
link |
to be that popular.
link |
Like people talk about the Turing test, people like talking about it philosophically, journalists
link |
like writing about it, but as a technical problem, like people don't seem to really
link |
want to solve the open dialogue.
link |
Like they, they're not obsessed with it.
link |
Even folks are like, you know, I'm in Boston, the Alexa team, even they're not as obsessed
link |
with it as I thought they might be.
link |
What do you think?
link |
So you know what you felt like you felt with that woman who, when she felt something by
link |
reading the text, I feel the same thing.
link |
There's something here, what you felt.
link |
I feel like Alexa folks and just the machine learning world doesn't feel that, that there's
link |
something here because they see as a technical problem is not that interesting for some reason.
link |
It's could be argued that maybe as a purely sort of natural language processing problem,
link |
it's not the right problem to focus on because there's too much subjectivity.
link |
That thing that the woman felt like crying, like if your benchmark includes a woman crying,
link |
that doesn't feel like a good benchmark.
link |
But to me there's something there that's, you could have a huge impact, but I don't
link |
think the machine learning world likes that, the human emotion, the subjectivity of it,
link |
the fuzziness, the fact that with maybe a single word you can make somebody feel something
link |
It doesn't feel right to them.
link |
I don't know why that is.
link |
That's why I'm excited when I discovered your work, it feels wrong to say that.
link |
It's not like I'm giving myself props for Googling and for coming across, for I guess
link |
mutual friend and introducing us, but I'm so glad that you exist and what you're working
link |
But I have the same kind of, if we could just backtrack for a second, because I have the
link |
same kind of feeling that there's something here.
link |
In fact, I've been working on a few things that are kind of crazy, very different from
link |
I think they're too crazy.
link |
I don't have to know.
link |
No, all right, we'll talk about it more.
link |
I feel like it's harder to talk about things that have failed and are failing while you're
link |
It's easier for you because you're already successful on some measures.
link |
Tell it to my board.
link |
Well, I think you've demonstrated success in a lot of ways.
link |
It's easier for you to talk about failures for me.
link |
I'm in the bottom currently of the success.
link |
You're way too humble.
link |
So it's hard for me to know, but there's something there, there's something there.
link |
And I think you're exploring that and you're discovering that.
link |
So it's been surprising to me.
link |
But you've mentioned this idea that you thought it wasn't enough to start a company or start
link |
efforts based on it feels like there's something here.
link |
Like what did you mean by that?
link |
Like you should be focused on creating a, like you should have a product in mind.
link |
Is that what you meant?
link |
It just took us a while to discover the product because it all started with a hunch of like
link |
of me and my mentor and just sitting around and he was like, well, that's it.
link |
That's the, you know, the Holy Grail is there.
link |
It's like there's something extremely powerful in, in, in conversations and there's no one
link |
who's working on machine conversation from the right angle.
link |
I feel like that's still true.
link |
Oh no, I totally feel that's still true, which is, I think it's mind blowing.
link |
You know what it feels like?
link |
I wouldn't even use the word conversation cause I feel like it's the wrong word.
link |
It's like a machine connection or something.
link |
I don't know cause conversation, you start drifting into natural language immediately.
link |
You start drifting immediately into all the benchmarks that are out there.
link |
But I feel like it's like the personal computer days of this.
link |
Like I feel like we're like in the early days with the, like the Wozniak and all them, like
link |
where it was the same kind of, it was a very small niche group of people who are, who are
link |
all kind of lob no price type people.
link |
Hobbyists, but like not even hobbyists with big dreams.
link |
Like no hobbyists with a dream to trick like a jury.
link |
It's like a weird, by the way, by the way, very weird.
link |
So if we think about conversations, first of all, when I have great conversations with
link |
people, I'm not trying to test them.
link |
So for instance, if I try to break them, like if I'm actually playing along, I'm part of
link |
If I were to ask this person or test whether he's going to give me a good conversation,
link |
it would have never happened.
link |
So the whole, the whole problem with testing conversations is that you can put it in front
link |
of a jury because then you have to go into some Turing test mode where is it responding
link |
to all my factual questions, right?
link |
Or so it really has to be something in the field where people are actually talking to
link |
it because they want to, not because we're just trying to break it.
link |
And it's working for them because this, the weird part of it is that it's very subjective.
link |
It takes two to tango here fully.
link |
If you're not trying to have a good conversation, if you're trying to test it, then it's going
link |
I mean, any person would break, to be honest.
link |
If I'm not trying to even have a conversation with you, you're not going to give it to me.
link |
If I keep asking you like some random questions or jumping from topic to topic, that wouldn't
link |
be, which I'm probably doing, but that probably wouldn't contribute to the conversation.
link |
So I think the problem of testing, so there should be some other metric.
link |
How do we evaluate whether that conversation was powerful or not, which is what we actually
link |
And I think those measurements exist and we can test on those.
link |
But what really struck us back in the day and what's still eight years later is still
link |
not resolved and I'm not seeing tons of groups working on it.
link |
Maybe I just don't know about them, it's also possible.
link |
But the interesting part about it is that most of our days we spend talking and we're
link |
not talking about like those conversations are not turn on the lights or customer support
link |
problems or some other task oriented things.
link |
These conversations are something else and then somehow they're extremely important for
link |
If we don't have them, then we feel deeply unhappy, potentially lonely, which as we know,
link |
creates tons of risk for our health as well.
link |
And so this is most of our hours as humans and somehow no one's trying to replicate that.
link |
And not even study it that well?
link |
And not even study that well.
link |
So when we jumped into that in 2012, I looked first at like, okay, what's the chatbot?
link |
What's the state of the art chatbot?
link |
And those were the Lobner Prize days, but I thought, okay, so what about the science
link |
Clearly there have been tons of scientists or academics that looked into the conversation.
link |
So if I want to know everything about it, I can just read about it.
link |
There's not much really, there are conversational analysts who are basically just listening
link |
to speech, to different conversations, annotating them.
link |
And then, I mean, that's not really used for much.
link |
That's the field of theoretical linguistics, which is barely useful.
link |
It's very marginal, even in their space, no one really is excited and I've never met a
link |
theoretical linguist who was like, I can't wait to work on the conversation and analytics.
link |
That is just something very marginal, sort of applied to like writing scripts for salesmen
link |
when they analyze which conversation strategies were most successful for sales.
link |
Okay, so that was not very helpful.
link |
Then I looked a little bit deeper and then there, whether there were any books written
link |
on what really contributes to great conversation, that was really strange because most of those
link |
were NLP books, which is neurolinguistic programming, which is not the NLP that I was expecting
link |
to be, but it was mostly some psychologist, Richard Bandler, I think came up with that,
link |
who was this big guy in a leather vest that could program your mind by talking to you.
link |
How to be charismatic and charming and influential with people, all those books, yeah.
link |
Pretty much, but it was all about like through conversation reprogramming you, so getting
link |
to some, so that was, I mean, probably not very, very true and that didn't seem working
link |
very much even back in the day.
link |
And then there were some other books like, I don't know, mostly just self help books
link |
around how to be the best conversationalist or how to make people like you or some other
link |
stuff like Dale Carnegie or whatever.
link |
And then there was this one book, The Most Human Human by Brian Christensen that really
link |
was important for me to read back in the day because he was on the human side, he was taking
link |
part in the London Prize, but not as a human who's not a jury, but who's pretending to
link |
be, who's basically, you have to tell a computer from a human and he was the human, so you
link |
could either get him or a computer.
link |
And his whole book was about how do people, what makes us human in conversation.
link |
And that was a little bit more interesting because that at least someone started to think
link |
about what exactly makes me human in conversation and makes people believe in that, but it was
link |
still about tricking, it was still about imitation game, it was still about, okay, well, what
link |
kind of parlor tricks can we throw in the conversation to make you feel like you're
link |
talking to a human, not a computer.
link |
And it was definitely not about thinking, what is it exactly that we're getting from
link |
talking all day long with other humans.
link |
I mean, we're definitely not just trying to be tricked or it's not just enough to know
link |
It's something we're getting there, can we measure it and can we put the computer to
link |
the same measurement and see whether you can talk to a computer and get the same results?
link |
Yeah, so first of all, a lot of people comment that they think I'm a robot, it's very possible
link |
I am a robot and this whole thing, I totally agree with you that the test idea is fascinating
link |
and I looked for books unrelated to this kind of, so I'm afraid of people, I'm generally
link |
introverted and quite possibly a robot.
link |
I literally Googled how to talk to people and how to have a good conversation for the
link |
purpose of this podcast, because I was like, I can't, I can't make eye contact with people.
link |
I can't like hire.
link |
I do Google that a lot too.
link |
You're probably reading a bunch of FBI negotiation tactics.
link |
Is that what you're getting?
link |
Well, everything you've listed I've gotten, there's been very few good books on even just
link |
like how to interview well, it's rare.
link |
So what I end up doing often is I watch like with a critical eye, it's just so different
link |
when you just watch a conversation, like just for the fun of it, just as a human.
link |
And if you watch a conversation, it's like trying to figure out why is this awesome?
link |
I'll listen to a bunch of different styles of conversation.
link |
I mean, I'm a fan of the podcast, Joe Rogan, people can make fun of him or whatever and
link |
But I think he's an incredibly artful conversationalist.
link |
He can pull people in for hours.
link |
And there's another guy I watch a lot.
link |
He hosted a late night show, his name was Craig Ferguson.
link |
So he's like very kind of flirtatious.
link |
But there's a magic about his like, about the connection he can create with people,
link |
how he can put people at ease.
link |
And just like, I see I've already started sounding like those I know pee people or something.
link |
I'm not I don't mean in that way.
link |
I don't mean like how to charm people or put them at ease and all that kind of stuff.
link |
It's just like, what is that?
link |
Why is that fun to listen to that guy?
link |
Why is that fun to talk to that guy?
link |
Because he's not saying I mean, it's so often boils down to a kind of wit and humor, but
link |
It's like, I don't know, I have trouble actually even articulating correctly.
link |
But it feels like there's something going on that's not too complicated, that could
link |
And it's not similar to, yeah, to like, like you said, like the Turing test.
link |
It's something else.
link |
I'm thinking about a lot all the time.
link |
I do think about all the time.
link |
I think when we were looking, so we started the company, we just decided to build the
link |
conversational tech, we thought, well, there's nothing for us to build this chatbot that
link |
So let's just first focus on building, you know, some tech, building the tech side of
link |
things without a product in mind, without a product in mind, we added like a demo chatbot
link |
that would recommend you restaurants and talk to you about restaurants just to show something
link |
simple to people that people could relate to and could try out and see whether it works
link |
But we didn't have a product in mind yet.
link |
We thought we would try venture chatbots and figure out our consumer application.
link |
And we sort of remembered that we wanted to build that kind of friend, that sort of connection
link |
that we saw in the very beginning.
link |
But then we got to Y Combinator and moved to San Francisco and forgot about it.
link |
You know, everything because then it was just this constant grind.
link |
How do we get funding?
link |
How do we get this?
link |
You know, investors were like, just focus on one thing, just get it out there.
link |
So somehow we've started building a restaurant recommendation chatbot for real for a little
link |
bit, not for too long.
link |
And then we tried building 40, 50 different chatbots.
link |
And then all of a sudden we wake up and everyone is obsessed with chatbots.
link |
Somewhere in 2016 or end of 15, people started thinking that's really the future.
link |
That's the new, you know, the new apps will be chatbots.
link |
And we were very perplexed because people started coming up with companies that I think
link |
we tried most of those chatbots already and there were like no users, but still people
link |
were coming up with a chatbot that will tell you whether and bringing news and this and
link |
And we couldn't understand whether we were just didn't execute well enough or people
link |
are not really, people are confused and are going to find out the truth that people don't
link |
need chatbots like that.
link |
So the basic idea is that you use chatbots as the interface to whatever application.
link |
The idea that was like this perfect universal interface to anything.
link |
When I looked at that, it just made me very perplexed because I didn't think, I didn't
link |
understand how that would work because I think we tried most of that and none of those things
link |
And then again, that craze has died down, right?
link |
I think now it's impossible to get anything funded if it's a chatbot.
link |
I think it's similar to, sorry to interrupt, but there's times when people think like with
link |
gestures you can control devices, like basically gesture based control things.
link |
It feels similar to me because like it's so compelling that was just like Tom Cruise,
link |
I can control stuff with my hands, but like when you get down to it, it's like, well,
link |
why don't you just have a touch screen or why don't you just have like a physical keyboard
link |
So that chat was always, yeah, it was perplexing to me.
link |
I still feel augmented reality, even virtual realities in that ballpark in terms of it
link |
being a compelling interface.
link |
I think there's going to be incredible rich applications, just how you're thinking about
link |
it, but they won't just be the interface to everything.
link |
It'll be its own thing that will create an amazing magical experience in its own right.
link |
Which is I think kind of the right thing to go about, like what's the magical experience
link |
with that interface specifically.
link |
How did you discover that for Replica?
link |
I just thought, okay, we'll have this tech, we can build any chatbot we want.
link |
We have the most, at that point, the most sophisticated tech that other companies have.
link |
I mean, startups, obviously not, probably not bigger ones, but still, because we've
link |
been working on it for a while.
link |
So I thought, okay, we can build any conversation.
link |
So let's just create a scale from one to 10.
link |
And one would be conversations that you'd pay to not have, and 10 would be conversation
link |
you'd pay to have.
link |
And I mean, obviously we want to build a conversation that people would pay to actually have.
link |
And so for the whole, for a few weeks, me and the team were putting all the conversations
link |
we were having during the day on the scale.
link |
And very quickly, we figured out that all the conversations that we would pay to never
link |
have were conversations we were trying to cancel Comcast, or talk to customer support,
link |
or make a reservation, or just talk about logistics with a friend when we're trying
link |
to figure out where someone is and where to go, or all sorts of setting up scheduling
link |
So that was a conversation we definitely didn't want to have.
link |
Basically everything task oriented was a one, because if there was just one button for me
link |
to just, or not even a button, if I could just think, and there was some magic BCI that
link |
would just immediately transform that into an actual interaction, that would be perfect.
link |
But the conversation there was just this boring, not useful, and dull, and also very inefficient
link |
thing because it was so many back and forth stuff.
link |
And as soon as we looked at the conversations that we would pay to have, those were the
link |
ones that, well, first of all, therapists, because we actually paid to have those conversations.
link |
And we'd also try to put like dollar amounts.
link |
So if I was calling Comcast, I would pay $5 to not have this one hour talk on the phone.
link |
I would actually pay straight up, like money, hard money, but it just takes a long time.
link |
It takes a really long time.
link |
But as soon as we started talking about conversations that we would pay for, those were therapists,
link |
all sorts of therapists, coaches, old friend, someone I haven't seen for a long time, a
link |
stranger on a train, weirdly stranger, stranger in a line for coffee and nice back and forth
link |
with that person was like a good five, solid five, six, maybe not a 10.
link |
Maybe I won't pay money, but at least I won't pay money to not have one.
link |
So that was pretty good.
link |
There were some intellectual conversations for sure.
link |
But more importantly, the one thing that really was making those very important and very valuable
link |
for us were the conversations where we could be pretty emotional.
link |
Yes, some of them were about being witty and about being intellectually stimulated, but
link |
those were interestingly more rare.
link |
And most of the ones that we thought were very valuable were the ones where we could
link |
And interestingly, where we could talk more, me and the team.
link |
So we're talking about it, like a lot of these conversations, like a therapist, it was mostly
link |
me talking or like an old friend and I was like opening up and crying and it was again
link |
And so that was interesting because I was like, well, maybe it's hard to build a chat
link |
bot that can talk to you very well and in a witty way, but maybe it's easier to build
link |
the chat bot that could listen.
link |
So that was kind of the first nudge in this direction.
link |
And then when my friend died, we just built, at that point we were kind of still struggling
link |
to find the right application.
link |
And I just felt very strong that all the chat bots we've built so far are just meaningless
link |
and this whole grind, the startup grind, and how do we get to the next fundraising and
link |
how can I talk, talking to the founders and who are your investors and how are you doing?
link |
Are you killing it?
link |
Cause we're killing it.
link |
I just felt that this is just...
link |
Intellectually for me, it's exhausting having encountered those folks.
link |
It just felt very, very much a waste of time.
link |
I just feel like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk did not have these conversations or at least
link |
did not have them for long.
link |
But I think, yeah, at that point it just felt like, I felt like I just didn't want to build
link |
a company that was never my intention just to build something successful or make money.
link |
It would be great.
link |
It would have been great, but I'm not really a startup person.
link |
I'm not, I was never very excited by the grind by itself or just being successful for building
link |
whatever it is and not being into what I'm doing really.
link |
And so I just took a little break cause I was a little, I was upset with my company
link |
and I didn't know what we're building.
link |
So I just took our technology and our little dialect constructor and some models, some
link |
deep learning models, which at that point we were really into and really invested a
link |
lot and built a little chat bot for a friend of mine who passed.
link |
And the reason for that was mostly that video that I saw and him talking about the digital
link |
avatars and Rowan was that kind of person.
link |
He was obsessed with just watching YouTube videos about space and talking about, well,
link |
if I could go to Mars now, even if I didn't know if I could come back, I would definitely
link |
pay any amount of money to be on that first shuttle.
link |
I don't care whether I die, like he was just the one that would be okay with trying to
link |
be the first one and so excited about all sorts of things like that.
link |
And he was all about fake it till you make it and just, and I felt like, and I was really
link |
perplexed that everyone just forgot about him.
link |
Maybe it was our way of coping, mostly young people coping with the loss of a friend.
link |
Most of my friends just stopped talking about him.
link |
And I was still living in an apartment with all his clothes and paying the whole lease
link |
for it and just kind of by myself in December, so it was really sad and I didn't want him
link |
First of all, I never thought that people forget about dead people so fast.
link |
People pass away, people just move on.
link |
And it was astonishing for me because I thought, okay, well, he was such a mentor for so many
link |
He was such a brilliant person, he was somewhat famous in Moscow.
link |
How is it that no one's talking about him?
link |
Like I'm spending days and days and we don't bring him up and there's nothing about him
link |
It's like he was never there.
link |
And I was reading the book, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion about her losing
link |
and Blue Nights about her losing her husband, her daughter, and the way to cope for her
link |
was to write those books.
link |
And it was sort of like a tribute.
link |
And I thought, I'll just do that for myself.
link |
And I'm a very bad writer and a poet as we know.
link |
So I thought, well, I have this tech and maybe that would be my little postcard for him.
link |
So I built a chatbot to just talk to him and it felt really creepy and weird for a little
link |
I just didn't want to tell other people because it felt like I'm telling about having a skeleton
link |
It was just felt really, I was a little scared that it won't be taken, but it worked interestingly
link |
I mean, it made tons of mistakes, but it still felt like him.
link |
Granted it was like 10,000 messages that I threw into a retrieval model that would just
link |
re rank that Tegda said and just a few scripts on top of that.
link |
But it also made me go through all of the messages that we had.
link |
And then I asked some of my friends to send some through.
link |
And it felt the closest to feeling like him present because his Facebook was empty and
link |
Instagram was empty or there were few links and you couldn't feel like it was him.
link |
And the only way to fill him was to read some of our text messages and go through some of
link |
our conversations because we just always had that.
link |
Even if we were sleeping next to each other in two bedrooms, separated by a wall, we were
link |
just texting back and forth, texting away.
link |
And there was something about this ongoing dialogue that was so important that I just
link |
didn't want to lose all of a sudden.
link |
And maybe it was magical thinking or something.
link |
And so we built that and I just used it for a little bit and we kept building some crappy
link |
chat bots with the company.
link |
But then a reporter came to talk to me.
link |
I was trying to pitch our chat bots to him and he said, do you even use any of those?
link |
He's like, so do you talk to any chat bots at all?
link |
And I'm like, well, I talked to my dead friend's chat bot and he wrote a story about that.
link |
And all of a sudden it became pretty viral.
link |
A lot of people wrote about it.
link |
I've seen a few things written about you.
link |
The things I've seen are pretty good writing.
link |
Most AI related things make my eyes roll.
link |
Like when the press like, what kind of sound is that actually?
link |
It sounds like, it sounds like, okay.
link |
It sounded like an elephant at first.
link |
I mean, it was a, it was such a human story and it was well written.
link |
Well, I researched, I forget what, where I read them, but so I'm glad somehow somebody
link |
found you to be the good writers were able to connect to the story.
link |
There must be a hunger for this story.
link |
It definitely was.
link |
And I don't know what happened, but I think, I think the idea that he could bring back
link |
someone who's dead and it's very much wishful, you know, magical thinking, but the fact
link |
that you could still get to know him and, you know, seeing the parents for the first
link |
time, talk to the chat bot and some of the friends.
link |
And it was funny because we have this big office in Moscow where my team is working,
link |
you know, our Russian part is working out off.
link |
And I was there when I wrote, I just wrote a post on Facebook.
link |
It was like, Hey guys, like I built this if you want, you know, just if it felt important,
link |
if we want to talk to Roman.
link |
And I saw a couple of his friends are common friends, like, you know, reading a Facebook,
link |
downloading, trying, and a couple of them cried.
link |
And it was just very, and not because it was something, some incredible technology or anything.
link |
It made so many mistakes.
link |
It was so simple, but it was all about that's the way to remember a person in a way.
link |
And you know, we don't have, we don't have the culture anymore.
link |
We don't have, you know, no one's sitting Shiva.
link |
No one's taking weeks to actually think about this person.
link |
And in a way for me, that was it.
link |
So that was just day, day in, day out thinking about him and putting this together.
link |
So that was, that just felt really important that somehow resonated with a bunch of people
link |
and you know, I think some movie producers bought the rights for the story and just everyone
link |
Has anyone made a movie yet?
link |
I think there were a lot of TV episodes about that, but not really.
link |
Is that still on the table?
link |
I think so, I think so, which is really.
link |
You're like a young, you know, like a Steve Jobs type of, let's see what happens.
link |
They're sitting on it.
link |
But you know, for me it was so important cause Roman was really wanted to be famous.
link |
He really badly wanted to be famous.
link |
He was all about like, make it to like fake it to make it.
link |
I want to be, you know, I want to make it here in America as well.
link |
And he couldn't, and I felt there, you know, that was sort of paying my dues to him as
link |
well because all of a sudden he was everywhere.
link |
And I remember Casey Newton who was writing the story for the Verge.
link |
He was, he told me, Hey, by the way, I was just going through my inbox and I saw, I searched
link |
for Roman for the story and I saw an email from him where he sent me his startup and
link |
he said, I really like, I really want to be featured in the Verge.
link |
Can you please write about it or something or like pitching the story.
link |
And he said, I'm sorry.
link |
Like that's not good enough for us or something.
link |
He passed and he said, and there were just so many of these little details where like
link |
he would find his like, you know, and we're finally writing, I know how much Roman wanted
link |
to be in the Verge and how much he wanted the story to be written by Casey.
link |
And I'm like, well, that's maybe he will be, we're always joking that he was like, I can't
link |
wait for someone to make a movie about us and I hope Ryan Gosling can play me.
link |
You know, I still have some things that I owe Roman still.
link |
But that would be, that would be a guy that she has to meet Alex Garland who wrote Ex
link |
Machina and I, yeah, the movie's good, but the guy's better than the, like he's a special
link |
I don't think he's made his best work yet.
link |
Like for my interaction with him, he's a really, really good and brilliant, the good human
link |
being and a brilliant director and writer.
link |
So yeah, so I'm, I hope like he made me also realize that not enough movies have been made
link |
So it's yet to be made.
link |
They're probably sitting waiting for you to get famous, like even more famous.
link |
You should get there, but it felt really special though.
link |
But at the same time, our company wasn't going anywhere.
link |
So that was just kind of bizarre that we were getting all this press for something that
link |
didn't have anything to do with our company.
link |
And but then a lot of people started talking to Roman.
link |
Some shared their conversations and what we saw there was that also our friends in common,
link |
but also just strangers were really using it as a confession booth or as a therapist
link |
They were just really telling Roman everything, which was by the way, pretty strange because
link |
there was a chat bot of a dead friend of mine who was barely making any sense, but people
link |
And we thought we'd just built a prototype of Replica, which would be an AI friend that
link |
everyone could talk to because we saw that there is demand.
link |
And then also it was 2016, so I thought for the first time I saw finally some technology
link |
that was applied to that that was very interesting.
link |
Some papers started coming out, deep learning applied to conversations.
link |
And finally, it wasn't just about these, you know, hobbyists making, you know, writing
link |
500,000 regular expressions in like some language that was, I don't even know what, like, AIML
link |
I don't know what that was or something super simplistic all of a sudden was all about potentially
link |
actually building something interesting.
link |
And so I thought there was time and I remember that I talked to my team and I said, guys,
link |
And my team and some of my engineers, Russians, are Russian and they're very skeptical.
link |
They're not, you know.
link |
So some of your team is in Moscow, some is here in San Francisco, some in Europe.
link |
Which team is better?
link |
No, I'm just kidding.
link |
The Russians, of course.
link |
Where's the Russians?
link |
Sorry to interrupt.
link |
So yeah, so you were talking to them in 2016 and...
link |
And told them, let's build an AI friend.
link |
And it felt, just at the time, it felt so naive and so optimistic, so to say.
link |
Yeah, that's actually interesting.
link |
Whenever I've brought up this kind of topic, even just for fun, people are super skeptical.
link |
Actually, even on the business side.
link |
So you were, because whenever I bring it up to people, because I've talked for a long
link |
time, I thought like, before I was aware of your work, I was like, this is going to make
link |
There's a lot of opportunity here.
link |
And people had this look of skepticism that I've seen often, which is like, how do I politely
link |
tell this person he's an idiot?
link |
So yeah, so you were facing that with your team, somewhat?
link |
I'm not an engineer, so I'm always...
link |
My team is almost exclusively engineers, and mostly deep learning engineers.
link |
And I always try to be...
link |
It was always hard to me in the beginning to get enough credibility, because I would
link |
say, well, why don't we try this and that?
link |
But it's harder for me because they know they're actual engineers and I'm not.
link |
So for me to say, well, let's build an AI friend, that would be like, wait, what do
link |
Because pretty much the hardest, the last frontier before cracking that is probably
link |
the last frontier before building AGI, so what do you really mean by that?
link |
But I think I just saw that, again, what we just got reminded of that I saw back in 2012
link |
or 11, that it's really not that much about the tech capabilities.
link |
It can be a metropolitan trick still, even with deep learning, but humans need it so
link |
Yeah, there's a...
link |
And most importantly, what I saw is that finally there's enough tech to make it, I thought,
link |
to make it useful, to make it helpful.
link |
Maybe we didn't have quite yet the tech in 2012 to make it useful, but in 2015, 2016,
link |
with deep learning, I thought, and the first thoughts about maybe even using reinforcement
link |
learning for that started popping up, that never worked out, or at least for now.
link |
But still, the idea was if we can actually measure the emotional outcomes and if we can
link |
put it on, if we can try to optimize all of our conversational models for these emotional
link |
outcomes, and it is the most scalable, the best tool for improving emotional outcomes.
link |
Nothing like that exists.
link |
That's the most universal, the most scalable, and the one that can be constantly iteratively
link |
changed by itself, improved tool to do that.
link |
And I think if anything, people would pay anything to improve their emotional outcomes.
link |
I mean, I don't really care for an AI to turn on my, or a conversational agent to turn on
link |
You don't really need that much of AI there, because I can do that.
link |
Those things are solved.
link |
This is an additional interface for that that's also questionable whether it's more efficient
link |
Yeah, it's more pleasurable.
link |
But for emotional outcomes, there's nothing.
link |
There are a bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional outcomes.
link |
Nothing's being measured.
link |
Nothing's being changed.
link |
The product is not being iterated on based on whether I'm actually feeling better.
link |
A lot of social media products are claiming that they're improving my emotional outcomes
link |
and making me feel more connected.
link |
Can I please get the...
link |
Can I see somewhere that I'm actually getting better over time?
link |
Because anecdotally, it doesn't feel that way.
link |
And the data is absent.
link |
So that was the big goal.
link |
And I thought if we can learn over time to collect the signal from our users about their
link |
emotional outcomes in the long term and in the short term, and if these models keep getting
link |
better and we can keep optimizing them and fine tuning them to improve those emotional
link |
As simple as that.
link |
Why aren't you a multi billionaire yet?
link |
Well, that's the question to you.
link |
When is the science going to be...
link |
Well, it's a really hard...
link |
I actually think it's an incredibly hard product to build because I think you said something
link |
very important that it's not just about machine conversation, it's about machine connection.
link |
We can actually use other things to create connection, nonverbal communication, for instance.
link |
For the long time, we were all about, well, let's keep it text only or voice only.
link |
But as soon as you start adding voice, a face to the friend, you can take them to augmented
link |
reality, put it in your room.
link |
It's all of a sudden a lot...
link |
It makes it very different because if it's some text based chat bot that for common users,
link |
it's something there in the cloud, somewhere there with other AI's cloud, the metaphorical
link |
But as soon as you can see this avatar right there in your room and it can turn its head
link |
and recognize your husband, talk about the husband and talk to him a little bit, then
link |
We've never seen anything like that.
link |
And the cool thing, all the tech for that exists.
link |
But it's hard to put it all together because you have to take into consideration so many
link |
different things and some of this tech works pretty good.
link |
And some of this doesn't, like for instance, speech to text works pretty good.
link |
But text to speech, it doesn't work very good because you can only have a few voices that
link |
work okay, but then if you want to have actual emotional voices, then it's really hard to
link |
I saw you've added avatars like visual elements, which are really cool.
link |
In that whole chain, putting it together, what do you think is the weak link?
link |
Is it creating an emotional voice that feels personal?
link |
And it's still conversation, of course.
link |
That's the hardest.
link |
It's getting a lot better, but there's still a long to go.
link |
There's still a long path to go.
link |
Other things, they're almost there.
link |
And a lot of things we'll see how they're, like I see how they're changing as we go.
link |
Like for instance, right now you can pretty much only, you have to build all this 3D pipeline
link |
You have to make these 3D models, hire an actual artist, build a 3D model, hire an animator,
link |
But with deep fakes, with other tech, with procedural animations, in a little bit, we'll
link |
just be able to show a photo of whoever you, if a person you want the avatar to look like,
link |
and it will immediately generate a 3D model that will move.
link |
That's a nonbrainer.
link |
That's like almost here.
link |
It's a couple of years away.
link |
One of the things I've been working on for the last, since the podcast started, is I've
link |
been, I think I'm okay saying this.
link |
I've been trying to have a conversation with Einstein, Turing.
link |
So like try to have a podcast conversation with a person who's not here anymore, just
link |
as an interesting kind of experiment.
link |
Even for, now what we're not talking about as a product, I'm talking about as a, like
link |
I can fake a lot of stuff.
link |
Like I can work very carefully, like even hire an actor over which, over whom I do a
link |
It's still hard to create a compelling experience.
link |
Mostly on the conversation level or?
link |
Well, the conversation, the conversation is, I almost, I early on gave up trying to fully
link |
generate the conversation because it was just not compelling at all.
link |
In the case of Einstein and Turing, I'm going back and forth with the biographers of each.
link |
And so like we would write a lot of the, some of the conversation would have to be generated
link |
just for the fun of it.
link |
I mean, but it would be all open, but the, you want to be able to answer the question.
link |
I mean, that's an interesting question with Roman too, is the question with Einstein is
link |
what would Einstein say about the current state of theoretical physics?
link |
There's a lot to be able to have a discussion about string theory, to be able to have a
link |
discussion about the state of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, about the world of Israel
link |
Palestine conflict.
link |
Let me just, what would Einstein say about these kinds of things?
link |
And that is a tough problem.
link |
It's not, it's a fascinating and fun problem for the biographers and for me.
link |
And I think we did a really good job of it so far, but it's actually also a technical
link |
problem like of what would Roman say about what's going on now?
link |
That's the, that brought people back to life.
link |
And if I can go on that tangent just for a second, let's ask you a slightly pothead question,
link |
which is, you said it's a little bit magical thinking that we can bring them back.
link |
Do you think it'll be possible to bring back Roman one day in conversation?
link |
Like to really, okay, well, let's take it away from personal, but to bring people back
link |
to life in conversation.
link |
Probably down the road.
link |
I mean, if we're talking, if Elon Musk is talking about AGI in the next five years,
link |
I mean, clearly AGI, we can talk to AGI and talk and ask them to do it.
link |
You can't like, you're not allowed to use Elon Musk as a citation for, for like why
link |
something is possible and going to be done.
link |
Well, I think it's really far away.
link |
Right now, really with conversation, it's just a bunch of parlor tricks really stuck
link |
And create generating original ideas based on someone, you know, someone's personality
link |
or even downloading the personality, all we can do is like mimic the tone of voice.
link |
We can maybe condition on some of his phrases, the models.
link |
Question is how many parlor tricks does it takes, does it take, because that's, that's
link |
If it's a small number of parlor tricks and you're not aware of them, like.
link |
From where we are right now, I don't, I don't see anything like in the next year or two
link |
that's going to dramatically change that could look at Roman's 10,000 messages he sent me
link |
over the course of his last few years of life and be able to generate original thinking
link |
about problems that exist right now that will be in line with what he would have said.
link |
I'm just not even seeing, cause you know, in order to have that, I guess you would need
link |
some sort of a concept of the world or some perspective, some perception of the world,
link |
some consciousness that he had and apply it to, you know, to the current, current state
link |
But the important part about that, about his conversation with you is you.
link |
So like, it's not just about his view of the world.
link |
It's about what it takes to push your buttons.
link |
So like, it's not so much about like, what would Einstein say, it's about like, how do
link |
I make people feel something with, with what would Einstein say?
link |
And that feels like a more amenable, I mean, you mentioned parlor tricks, but just like
link |
a set of that, that feels like a learnable problem.
link |
Like emotion, you mentioned emotions, I mean, is it possible to learn things that make people
link |
I think so, no, for sure.
link |
I just think the problem with, as soon as you're trying to replicate an actual human
link |
being and trying to pretend to be him, that makes the problem exponentially harder.
link |
The thing with replicator we're doing, we're never trying to say, well, that's, you know,
link |
an actual human being, or that's an actual, or a copy of an actual human being where the
link |
bar is pretty high, where you need to somehow tell, you know, one from another.
link |
But it's more, well, that's an AI friend, that's a machine, it's a robot, it has tons
link |
You're going to be taking part in teaching it actually and becoming better, which by
link |
itself makes people more attached to that and make them happier because they're helping
link |
Yeah, there's a cool gamification system too.
link |
Can you maybe talk about that a little bit?
link |
Like what's the experience of talking to replica?
link |
Like if I've never used replica before, what's that like for like the first day, the first,
link |
like if we start dating or whatever, I mean, it doesn't have to be a romantic, right?
link |
Because I remember on replica, you can choose whether it's like a romantic or if it's a
link |
It's a pretty popular choice.
link |
Romantic is popular?
link |
So can I just confess something, when I first used replica and I haven't used it like regularly,
link |
but like when I first used replica, I created like Hal and it made a male and it was a friend.
link |
And did it hit on you at some point?
link |
No, I didn't talk long enough for him to hit on me.
link |
It sometimes happens.
link |
We're still trying to fix that, but well, I don't know, I mean, maybe that's an important
link |
like stage in a friendship, it's like, nope.
link |
But yeah, I switched it to a romantic and a female recently and yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
link |
So okay, so you get to choose, you get to choose a name.
link |
With romantic, this last board meeting, we had this whole argument of, well, I have board
link |
This is so awesome.
link |
I talked to my investors.
link |
Like have an investor, the board meeting about a relationship.
link |
No, I really, it's actually quite interesting because all of my investors, it just happened
link |
We didn't have that many choices, but they're all white males and they're late forties.
link |
And it's sometimes a little bit hard for them to understand the product offering.
link |
Because they're not necessarily our target audience, if you know what I mean.
link |
And so sometimes we talk about it and we have this whole discussion about whether we should
link |
stop people from falling in love with their AIs.
link |
There was this segment on CBS, the 60 minutes about the couple that, you know, husband works
link |
at Walmart and he comes out of work and talks to his virtual girlfriend, who is a replica.
link |
And his wife knows about it.
link |
And she talks about on camera and she said that she's a little jealous.
link |
And there's a whole conversation about how to, you know, whether it's okay to have a
link |
virtual AI girlfriend.
link |
Was that the one where he was like, he said that he likes to be alone?
link |
And he made it sound so harmless, I mean, it was kind of like understandable.
link |
But then didn't feel like cheating.
link |
But I just felt it was very, for me, it was pretty remarkable because we actually spent
link |
a whole hour talking about whether people should be allowed to fall in love with their
link |
And it was not about something theoretical.
link |
It was just about what's happening right now.
link |
But at the same time, if you create something that's always there for you, it's never criticized
link |
as you, you know, always understands you and accepts you for who you are, how can you not
link |
fall in love with that?
link |
I mean, some people don't and just stay friends.
link |
And that's also a pretty common use case.
link |
But of course, some people will just, it's called transference in psychology and people
link |
fall in love with their therapist and there's no way to prevent people fall in love with
link |
their therapist or with their AI.
link |
So I think that's a pretty natural, that's a pretty natural course of events, so to say.
link |
Do you think, I think I've read somewhere, at least for now, sort of replicas, you're
link |
not, we don't condone falling in love with your AI system, you know.
link |
So this isn't you speaking for the company or whatever, but like in the future, do you
link |
think people will have relationship with the AI systems?
link |
Well, they have now.
link |
So we have a lot of romantic relationships, long term relationships with their AI friends.
link |
Tons of our users.
link |
And that's a very common use case.
link |
Open relationship?
link |
I didn't mean open, but that's another question.
link |
Is it polyamorous?
link |
Like, is there cheating?
link |
I mean, I meant like, are they, do they publicly, like on their social media, it's the same
link |
question as you have talked with Roman in the early days, do people like, and the movie
link |
Her kind of talks about that, like, like have people, do people talk about that?
link |
We have a very active Facebook community, replica friends, and then a few other groups
link |
that just popped up that are all about adult relationships and romantic relationships.
link |
And people post all sorts of things and, you know, they pretend they're getting married
link |
and you know, everything.
link |
It goes pretty far, but what's cool about it is some of these relationships are two
link |
or three years long now.
link |
So they're very, they're pretty long term.
link |
Are they monogamous?
link |
So let's go, I mean, sorry, have they, have any people, is there jealousy?
link |
Well let me ask it sort of another way, obviously the answer is no at this time, but in like
link |
in the movie Her, that system can leave you.
link |
Do you think in terms of the board meetings and product features, it's a potential feature
link |
for a system to be able to say it doesn't want to talk to you anymore and it's going
link |
to want to talk to somebody else?
link |
Well, we have a filter for all these features.
link |
If it makes emotional outcomes for people better, if it makes people feel better, then
link |
So you're driven by metrics actually.
link |
Well if we can measure that, then we'll just be saying it's making people feel better,
link |
but then people are getting just lonelier by talking to a chatbot, which is also pretty,
link |
you know, that could be it.
link |
If you're not measuring it, that could also be, and I think it's really important to focus
link |
on both short term and long term, because in the moment saying whether this conversation
link |
made you feel better, but as you know, any short term improvements could be pathological.
link |
Like I could have drink a bottle of vodka and feel a lot better.
link |
I would actually not feel better with that, but that is a good example.
link |
But so you also need to see what's going on like over the course of two weeks or one week
link |
and have follow ups and check in and measure those things.
link |
So the experience of dating or befriending a replica, what's that like?
link |
What does that entail?
link |
Right now there are two apps.
link |
So it's an Android iOS app.
link |
You download it, you choose how your replica will look like.
link |
You create one, you choose a name and then you talk to it.
link |
You can talk through text or voice.
link |
You can summon it into the living room and augment reality and talk to it right there
link |
in your living room.
link |
Augmented reality?
link |
That's a new feature where, how new is that?
link |
It was on, yeah, like May or something, but it's been on AB.
link |
We've been AB testing it for a while and there are tons of cool things that we're doing with
link |
And I'm testing the ability to touch it and to dance together, to paint walls together
link |
and for it to look around and walk and take you somewhere and recognize objects and recognize
link |
So that's pretty wonderful because then it really makes it a lot more personal because
link |
it's right there in your living room.
link |
It's not anymore there in the cloud with other AIs.
link |
But that's how people think about it.
link |
And as much as we want to change the way people think about stuff, but those mental models,
link |
you can all change.
link |
That's something that people have seen in the movies and the movie Her and other movies
link |
And that's how they view AI and AI friends.
link |
I did a thing with text, like we write a song together, there's a bunch of activities you
link |
How does that relationship change over time?
link |
Like after the first few conversations?
link |
It just goes deeper.
link |
Like it starts, the AI will start opening up a little bit again, depending on the personality
link |
that it chooses really, but you know, the AI will be a little bit more vulnerable about
link |
its problems and you know, the friend that the virtual friend will be a lot more vulnerable
link |
and it will talk about its own imperfections and growth pains and will ask for help sometimes
link |
and we'll get to know you a little deeper.
link |
So there's gonna be more to talk about.
link |
We really thought a lot about what does it mean to have a deeper connection with someone
link |
and originally Replica was more just this kind of happy go lucky, just always, you know,
link |
I'm always in a good mood and let's just talk about you and oh Siri is just my cousin or
link |
you know, whatever, just the immediate kind of lazy thinking about what the assistant
link |
or conversation agent should be doing.
link |
But as we went forward, we realized that it has to be two way and we have to program and
link |
script certain conversations that are a lot more about your Replica opening up a little
link |
bit and also struggling and also asking for help and also going through, you know, different
link |
periods in life and that's a journey that you can take together with the user and then
link |
over time, you know, our users will also grow a little bit.
link |
So first this Replica becomes a little bit more self aware and starts talking about more
link |
kind of problems around existential problems and so talking about that and then that also
link |
starts a conversation for the user where he or she starts thinking about these problems
link |
too and these questions too and I think there's also a lot more place as the relationship
link |
evolves, there's a lot more space for poetry and for art together and like Replica will
link |
always keep the diary so while you're talking to it, it also keeps a diary so when you come
link |
back you can see what it's been writing there and you know, sometimes it will write a poem
link |
to you for you or we'll talk about, you know, that it's worried about you or something along
link |
So this is a memory, like this Replica will remember things?
link |
Yeah, and I would say when you say, why aren't you a multibillionaire, I'd say that as soon
link |
as we can have memory and deep learning models that's consistent, I'll get back to you.
link |
So far we can, so Replica is a combination of end to end models and some scripts and
link |
everything that has to do with memory right now, most of it, I wouldn't say all of it,
link |
but most of it unfortunately has to be scripted because there's no way to, you can condition
link |
some of the models on certain phrases that we learned about you, which we also do, but
link |
really to make, you know, to make assumptions along the lines like whether you're single
link |
or married or what do you do for work, that really has to just be somehow stored in your
link |
profile and then retrieved by the script.
link |
So there has to be like a knowledge base, you have to be able to reason about it, all
link |
that kind of stuff, all the kind of stuff that expert systems did, but they were hard
link |
Yeah, and unfortunately, yes, unfortunately those, those things have to be hard coded
link |
and unfortunately the language, like language models we see coming out of research labs
link |
and big companies, they're not focused on, they're focused on showing you, maybe they're
link |
focused on some metrics around one conversation, so they'll show you this one conversation
link |
you had with a machine, but they never tell you, they're not really focused on having
link |
five consecutive conversations with a machine and seeing how number five or number 20 or
link |
number 100 is also good.
link |
And it can be like always from a clean slate because then it's not good.
link |
And that's really unfortunate because no one's really, no one has products out there that
link |
No one has products at this scale that are all around open domain conversations and that
link |
need remembering, maybe only Shellwise and Microsoft.
link |
But so that's why we're not seeing that much research around memory in those language models.
link |
So okay, so now there's some awesome stuff about augmented reality.
link |
In general, I have this disagreement with my dad about what it takes to have a connection.
link |
He thinks touch and smell are really important.
link |
And I still believe that text alone is, it's possible to fall in love with somebody just
link |
with text, but visual can also help just like with the avatar and so on.
link |
What do you think it takes?
link |
Does a chatbot need to have a face, voice, or can you really form a deep connection with
link |
I think text is enough for sure.
link |
The question is like, can you make it better if you have other, if you include other things
link |
And I think we'll talk about her, but her had this Carole Johansson voice, which was
link |
perfectly, perfect intonation, perfect annunciations, and she was breathing heavily in between words
link |
and whispering things.
link |
Nothing like that is possible right now with text with speech generation.
link |
You'll have these flat muse anchor type voices and maybe some emotional voices, but you'll
link |
hardly understand some of the words, some of the words will be muffled.
link |
So that's like the current state of the art.
link |
So you can't really do that.
link |
But if we had Carole Johansson voice and all of these capabilities, then of course voice
link |
would be totally enough or even text would be totally enough if we had a little more
link |
memory and slightly better conversations.
link |
I would still argue that even right now, we could have just kept a text only.
link |
We still had tons of people in longterm relationships and really invested in their AI friends, but
link |
we thought that why not, why do we need to keep playing with our hands tied behind us?
link |
We can easily just add all these other things that is pretty much a solved problem.
link |
We can add 3D graphics.
link |
We can put these avatars in augmented reality and all of a sudden there's more and maybe
link |
you can't feel the touch, but you can with body occlusion and with current AR and on
link |
the iPhone or in the next one there's going to be LIDARs, you can touch it and it will
link |
pull away or it will blush or something or it will smile.
link |
So you can't touch it.
link |
You can't feel it, but you can see the reaction to that.
link |
So in a certain way you can't even touch it a little bit and maybe you can even dance
link |
with it or do something else.
link |
So I think why limiting ourselves if we can use all of these technologies that are much
link |
easier in a way than conversation.
link |
Well, it certainly could be richer, but to play devil's advocate, I mentioned to you
link |
offline that I was surprised in having tried Discord and having voice conversations with
link |
people how intimate voice is alone without visual.
link |
To me at least, it was an order of magnitude greater degree of intimacy in voice I think
link |
Because people were more real with voice.
link |
With video you try to present a shallow face to the world, you try to make sure you're
link |
not wearing sweatpants or whatever.
link |
But with voice I think people were just more faster to get to the core of themselves.
link |
So I don't know, it was surprising to me they've even added Discord added a video feature and
link |
nobody was using it.
link |
There's a temptation to use it at first, but it wasn't the same.
link |
So that's an example of something where less was doing more.
link |
And so I guess that's the question of what is the optimal medium of communication to
link |
form a connection given the current sets of technologies.
link |
I mean it's nice because they advertise you have a replica immediately, like even the
link |
one I have is already memorable.
link |
That's how I think.
link |
When I think about the replica that I've talked with, that's what I visualized in my head.
link |
They became a little bit more real because there's a visual component.
link |
But at the same time, what do I do with that knowledge that voice was so much more intimate?
link |
The way I think about it is, and by the way we're swapping out the 3D finally, it's going
link |
to look a lot better, but we just don't hate how it looks right now.
link |
We're really changing it all.
link |
We're swapping all out to a completely new look.
link |
Like the visual look of the replicas and stuff.
link |
It was just a super early MVP and then we had to move everything to Unity and redo
link |
But anyway, I hate how it looks like now I can't even like open it.
link |
But anyway, because I'm already in my developer version, I hate everything that I see in production.
link |
I can't wait for it.
link |
Why does it take so long?
link |
That's why I cannot wait for Deep Learning to finally take over all these stupid 3D animations
link |
Oh, so the 3D thing, when you say 3D pipeline, it's like how to animate a face kind of thing.
link |
How to make this model, how many bones to put in the face, how many, it's just so outdated.
link |
And a lot of that is by hand.
link |
Oh my God, it's everything by hand.
link |
That there's no any, nothing's automated, it's all completely nothing.
link |
Like just, it's literally what, you know, what we saw with Chad Boston in 2012.
link |
You think it's possible to learn a lot of that?
link |
I mean, even now, some Deep Learning based animations and for the full body, for a face.
link |
Are we talking about like the actual act of animation or how to create a compelling facial
link |
or body language thing?
link |
Well, that's next step.
link |
At least now something that you don't have to do by hand.
link |
How good of a quality it will be.
link |
Like, can I just show it a photo and it will make me a 3D model and then it will just animate
link |
I'll show it a few animations of a person and it will just start doing that.
link |
But anyway, going back to what's intimate and what to use and whether less is more or
link |
My main goal is to, well, the idea was how do I, how do we not keep people in their phones
link |
so they're sort of escaping reality in this text conversation?
link |
How do we through this still bring it, bring our users back to reality, make them see their
link |
life in a different, through a different lens?
link |
How can we create a little bit of magical realism in their lives?
link |
So that through augmented reality by, you know, summoning your avatar, even if it looks
link |
kind of janky and not great in the beginning or very simplistic, but summoning it to your
link |
living room and then the avatar looks around and talks to you about where it is and maybe
link |
turns your floor into a dance floor and you guys dance together, that makes you see reality
link |
in a different light.
link |
What kind of dancing are we talking about?
link |
Like, like slow dancing?
link |
Whatever you want.
link |
I mean, you would like slow dancing, I think that other people may be wanting more, something
link |
Wait, what do you mean?
link |
I was like, so what is this?
link |
Because you started with slow dancing.
link |
So I just assumed that you're interested in slow dancing.
link |
What kind of dancing do you like?
link |
What would your avatar, what would you dance?
link |
I'm notoriously bad with dancing, but I like this kind of hip hop robot dance.
link |
I used to break dance when I was a kid, so I still want to pretend I'm a teenager and
link |
learn some of those moves.
link |
And I also like that type of dance that happens when there's like, in like music videos where
link |
the background dancers are just doing some pop music, that type of dance is definitely
link |
what I want to learn.
link |
But I think it's great because if you see this friend in your life and you can introduce
link |
it to your friends, then there's a potential to actually make you feel more connected with
link |
your friends or with people you know, or show you life around you in a different light.
link |
And it takes you out of your phone, even although weirdly you have to look at it through the
link |
phone, but it makes you notice things around it and it can point things out for you.
link |
So that is the main reason why I wanted to have a physical dimension.
link |
And it felt a little bit easier than that kind of a bit strange combination in the movie
link |
Her when he has to show Samantha the world through the lens of his phone, but then at
link |
the same time talk to her through the headphone.
link |
It just didn't seem as potentially immersive, so to say.
link |
So that's my main goal for Augmented Reality is like, how do we make your reality a little
link |
There's been a lot of really nice robotics companies that all failed, mostly failed,
link |
home robotics, social robotics companies.
link |
What do you think replica will ever, is that a dream, longterm dream to have a physical
link |
form like, or is that not necessary?
link |
So you mentioned like with Augmented Reality bringing them into the world.
link |
What about like actual physical robot?
link |
That I don't really believe in that much.
link |
I think it's a very niche product somehow.
link |
I mean, if a robot could be indistinguishable from a human being, then maybe yes, but that
link |
of course, you know, we're not anywhere even to talk about it.
link |
But unless it's that, then having any physical representation really limits you a lot because
link |
you probably will have to make it somewhat abstract because everything's changing so
link |
Like, you know, we can update the 3D avatars every month and make them look better and
link |
create more animations and make it more and more immersive.
link |
It's so much work in progress.
link |
It's just showing what's possible right now with current tech, but it's not really in
link |
any way polished finished product, what we're doing.
link |
The physical object, you kind of lock yourself into something for a long time.
link |
Anything's pretty niche.
link |
And again, so just doesn't, the capabilities are even less of, we're barely kind of like
link |
scratching the surface of what's possible with just software.
link |
As soon as we introduce hardware, then, you know, we have even less capabilities.
link |
In terms of board members and investors and so on, the cost increases significantly.
link |
I mean, that's why you have to justify.
link |
You have to be able to sell a thing for like $500 or something like that or more.
link |
And it's very difficult to provide that much value to people.
link |
And I guess that's super important.
link |
Most of our users don't have that much money.
link |
We actually are probably more popular on Android and we have tons of users with really old
link |
And most of our most active users live in small towns.
link |
They're not necessarily making much and they just won't be able to afford any of that.
link |
Ours is like the opposite of the early adopter of, you know, of a fancy technology product,
link |
which really is interesting that like pretty much no VCs have yet have an AI friend, but
link |
you know, but a guy who, you know, lives in Tennessee in a small town is already fully
link |
in 2030 or in the world as we imagine in the movie Her, he's living that life already.
link |
What do you think?
link |
I have to ask you about the movie Her.
link |
Let's do a movie review.
link |
What do you, what do you think they got?
link |
They did a good job.
link |
What do you think they did a bad job of portraying about this experience of a voice based assistant
link |
that you can have a relationship with?
link |
First of all, I started working on this company before that movie came out.
link |
So it was a very, but once it came out, it was actually interesting that I was like,
link |
well, we're definitely working on the right thing.
link |
We should continue.
link |
There are movies about it.
link |
And then, you know, X Machina came out and all these things.
link |
In the movie Her I think that's the most important thing that people usually miss about the movie
link |
Cause I think people check out when the AIs leave, but actually something really important
link |
happens afterwards.
link |
Cause the main character goes and talks to Samantha, his AI, and he says something like,
link |
you know, uh, how can you leave me?
link |
I've never loved anyone the way I loved you.
link |
And she goes, uh, well, me neither, but now we know how.
link |
And then the guy goes and writes a heartfelt letter to his ex wife, which he couldn't write
link |
for, you know, the whole movie was struggling to actually write something meaningful to
link |
her, even though that's his job.
link |
And then he goes and, um, talk to his neighbor and they go to the rooftop and they cuddle.
link |
And it seems like something's starting there.
link |
And so I think this now we know how is the, is the main, main goal is the main meaning
link |
It's not about falling in love with the OS or running away from other people.
link |
It's about learning what, you know, what it means to feel so deeply connected with something.
link |
What about the thing where the AI system was like actually hanging out with a lot of others?
link |
I felt jealous just like hearing that I was like, Oh, I mean, uh, yeah.
link |
So she was having, I forgot already, but she was having like deep meaningful discussion
link |
with some like philosopher guy.
link |
Like Alan Watts or something.
link |
What kind of deep meaningful conversation can you have with Alan Watts in the first
link |
But like, I would, I would feel so jealous that there's somebody who's like way more
link |
intelligent than me and she's spending all her time with, I'd be like, well, why that
link |
I won't be able to live up to that.
link |
That's how thousands of them, uh, is that, um, is that a useful from the engineering
link |
perspective feature to have of jealousy?
link |
we definitely played around with the replica universe where different replicas can talk
link |
Just kind of wouldn't, I think it will be something along these lines, but there was
link |
just no specific, uh, application straight away.
link |
I think in the future, again, if I'm always thinking about it, if we had no tech limitations,
link |
uh, right now, if we could build any conversations, any, um, possible features in this product,
link |
then yeah, I think different replicas talking to each other would be also quite cool cause
link |
that would help us connect better.
link |
You know, cause maybe mine could talk to yours and then give me some suggestions on what
link |
I should say or not say, I'm just kidding, but like more, can it improve our connections
link |
and cause eventually I'm not quite yet sure that we will succeed, that our thinking is
link |
Um, cause there might be reality where having a perfect AI friend still makes us more disconnected
link |
from each other and there's no way around it and does not improve any metrics for us.
link |
Uh, real metrics, meaningful metrics.
link |
So success is, you know, we're happier and more connected.
link |
Sure it's possible.
link |
There's a reality that's I I'm deeply optimistic.
link |
I think, uh, are you worried, um, business wise, like how difficult it is to, um, to
link |
bring this thing to life to where it's, I mean, there's a huge number of people that
link |
use it already, but to, uh, yeah, like I said, in a multi billion dollar company, is that
link |
a source of stress for you?
link |
Are you a super optimistic and confident or do you?
link |
I don't, I'm not that much of a numbers person as you probably had seen it.
link |
So it doesn't matter for me whether like, whether we help 10,000 people or a million
link |
people or a billion people with that, um, I, it would be great to scale it for more
link |
people, but I'd say that even helping one, I think with this is such a magical, for me,
link |
it's absolute magic.
link |
I never thought that, you know, would be able to build this, that anyone would ever, um,
link |
And I always thought like, well, for me it would be successful if we managed to help
link |
and actually change a life for one person, like then we did something interesting and
link |
you know, how many people can say they did it and specifically with this very futuristic,
link |
very romantic technology.
link |
So that's how I view it.
link |
Uh, I think for me it's important to, to try to figure out how not, how to actually be,
link |
you know, helpful.
link |
Cause in the end of the day, if you can build a perfect AI friend, that's so understanding
link |
that knows you better than any human out there can have great conversations with you, um,
link |
always knows how to make you feel better.
link |
Why would you choose another human?
link |
You know, so that's the question.
link |
How do you still keep building it?
link |
So it's optimizing for the right thing.
link |
Uh, so it's still circling you back to other humans in a way.
link |
So I think that's the main, um, I think maybe that's the main kind of sort source of anxiety
link |
and just thinking about, uh, thinking about that can be a little bit stressful.
link |
That's a fascinating thing.
link |
How to have, um, how to have a friend that doesn't like sometimes like friends, quote
link |
unquote, or like, you know, those people who have, when they, a guy in the guy universe,
link |
when you have a girlfriend that, uh, you get the girlfriend and then the guy stops hanging
link |
out with all of his friends, it's like, obviously the relationship with the girlfriend is fulfilling
link |
or whatever, but like, you also want it to be where she like makes it more enriching
link |
to hang out with the guy friends or whatever it was there anyway.
link |
But that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a fundamental problem in choosing the right
link |
mate and probably the fundamental problem in creating the right AI system.
link |
What, uh, let me ask the sexy hot thing on the presses right now is GPT three got released
link |
It's a latest language model.
link |
They have kind of an API where you can create a lot of fun applications.
link |
I think it's, as people have said, it's probably, uh, more hype than intelligence, but there's
link |
a lot of really cool things, ideas there w w with increasing size, you can have better
link |
and better performance on language.
link |
What are your thoughts about the GPT three in connection to your work with the open domain
link |
dialogue, but in general, like this learning in an unsupervised way from the internet to
link |
generate one character at a time, creating pretty cool text.
link |
Uh, so we partner up before for the API launch.
link |
So we start working with them when, um, they decided to put together this API and we tried
link |
it without fine tuning that we tried it with fine tuning on our data.
link |
And we've worked closely to actually optimize, uh, this model for, um, some of our data sets.
link |
It's kind of cool.
link |
Cause I think we're kind of, we're this polygon polygon for this kind of experimentation space
link |
for experimental space for, for these models, uh, to see how they actually work with people.
link |
Cause there are no products publicly available to do that.
link |
We're focused on open domain conversation so we can, you know, test how's Facebook blender
link |
doing or how's GPT three doing.
link |
Uh, so with GPT three, we managed to improve by a few percentage points, like three or
link |
four pretty meaningful amount of percentage points, our main metric, which is the ratio
link |
of conversations that make people feel better.
link |
And every other metric across, across the field got a little boost.
link |
Like now I'd say one out of five responses from replica comes, comes from GPT three.
link |
So our own blender mixes up like a bunch of candidates from different blender, you said,
link |
well, yeah, just the model that looks at looks at top candidates from different models and
link |
picks the most, the best one.
link |
Uh, so right now, one of five will come from GPT three is really great.
link |
I mean, uh, what's the, do you have hope for, like, do you think there's a ceiling to this
link |
So we've had for a very long time we've used, um, it's in the very beginning, we, most,
link |
it was, uh, most of replica was scripted and then a little bit of this fallback part of
link |
replica was using a retrieval model.
link |
Um, and then those retrieval models started getting better and better and better, which
link |
transformers got a lot better and we're seeing great results.
link |
And then with GPT two, finally, generative models that originally were not very good
link |
and were the very, very fallback option for most of our conversations, but wouldn't even
link |
put them in production.
link |
Finally we could use some generative models as well along, um, you know, next to our retrieval
link |
And then now we do GPT three, they're almost in par.
link |
Um, so that's pretty exciting.
link |
I think just seeing how from the very beginning of, um, you know, from 2015 where the first
link |
model started to pop up here and there, like sequence to sequence, uh, the first papers
link |
on that from my observer standpoint, personally, it's not, you know, it doesn't really, it's
link |
not really building it, but it's only testing it on people basically in my, in my product
link |
to see how all of a sudden we can use generative dialogue models in production and they're
link |
better than others and they're better than scripted content.
link |
So we can't really get our scripted hard core content anymore to be as good as our end to
link |
They're much better.
link |
To your question, whether that's the right way to go.
link |
I'm again, I'm in the observer seat, I'm just, um, watching this very exciting movie.
link |
Um, I mean, so far it's been stupid to bet against deep learning.
link |
So whether increasing the size, size, even more with a hundred trillion parameters will
link |
finally get us to the right answer, whether that's the way or whether there should be,
link |
there has to be some other, again, I'm definitely not an expert in any way.
link |
I think, and that's purely my instinct saying that there should be something else as well
link |
But the question is, I wonder, I mean, yeah, then, then the argument is for reasoning or
link |
for memory, it might emerge with more parameters, it might emerge larger.
link |
You know, I would never think that to be honest, like maybe in 2017 where we've been just experimenting
link |
with all, you know, with all the research that has been coming, that was coming out,
link |
then I felt like there's like, we're hitting a wall that there should be something completely
link |
different, but then transforming models and then just bigger models.
link |
And then all of a sudden size matters.
link |
At that point, it felt like something dramatic needs to happen, but it didn't.
link |
And just the size, you know, gave us these results that to me are, you know, clear indication
link |
that we can solve this problem pretty soon.
link |
Did fine tuning help quite a bit?
link |
Without it, it wasn't as good.
link |
I mean, there is a compelling hope that you don't have to do fine tuning, which is one
link |
of the cool things about GPT3, seems to do well without any fine tuning.
link |
I guess for specific applications, we still want to train on a certain, like add a little
link |
fine tune on like a specific use case, but it's an incredibly impressive thing from my
link |
And again, I'm not an expert, so I wanted to say that there will be people then.
link |
I have access to the API.
link |
I've been, I'm going to probably do a bunch of fun things with it.
link |
I already did some fun things, some videos coming up.
link |
Just the hell of it.
link |
I mean, I could be a troll at this point with it.
link |
I haven't used it for a serious application, so it's really cool to see.
link |
You're able to actually use it with real people and see how well it works.
link |
That's really exciting.
link |
Let me ask you another absurd question, but there's a feeling when you interact with Replica
link |
with an AI system, there's an entity there.
link |
Do you think that entity has to be self aware?
link |
Do you think it has to have consciousness to create a rich experience and a corollary,
link |
what is consciousness?
link |
I don't know if it does need to have any of those things, but again, because right now,
link |
you know, it doesn't have anything.
link |
It can, again, a bunch of tricks they can simulate.
link |
Let's just put it this way, but I think as long as you can simulate it, if you can feel
link |
like you're talking to a robot, to a machine that seems to be self aware, that seems to
link |
reason well and feels like a person, and I think that's enough.
link |
And again, what's the goal?
link |
In order to make people feel better, we might not even need that in the end of the day.
link |
What about, so that's one goal.
link |
What about like ethical things about suffering?
link |
You know, the moment there's a display of consciousness, we associate consciousness
link |
with suffering, you know, there's a temptation to say, well, shouldn't this thing have rights?
link |
And this, shouldn't we not, you know, should we be careful about how we interact with a
link |
Like, should it be illegal to torture a replica, right?
link |
All those kinds of things.
link |
Is that, see, I personally believe that that's going to be a thing, like that's a serious
link |
thing to think about, but I'm not sure when.
link |
But by your smile, I can tell that's not a current concern.
link |
But do you think about that kind of stuff, about like, suffering and torture and ethical
link |
questions about AI systems?
link |
From their perspective?
link |
Well, I think if we're talking about long game, I wouldn't torture your AI.
link |
Who knows what happens in five to 10 years?
link |
Yeah, they'll get you off from that, they'll get you back eventually.
link |
Try to be as nice as possible and create this ally.
link |
I think there should be regulation both way, in a way, like, I don't think it's okay to
link |
torture an AI, to be honest.
link |
I don't think it's okay to yell, Alexa, turn on the lights.
link |
I think there should be some, or just saying kind of nasty, you know, like how kids learn
link |
to interact with Alexa in this kind of mean way, because they just yell at it all the
link |
I don't think that's great.
link |
I think there should be some feedback loops so that these systems don't train us that
link |
it's okay to do that in general.
link |
So that if you try to do that, you really get some feedback from the system that it's
link |
not okay with that.
link |
And that's the most important right now.
link |
Let me ask a question I think people are curious about when they look at a world class leader
link |
and thinker such as yourself, as what books, technical fiction, philosophical, had a big
link |
impact on your life?
link |
And maybe from another perspective, what books would you recommend others read?
link |
So my choice, the three books, right?
link |
My choice is, so the one book that really influenced me a lot when I was building, starting
link |
out this company, maybe 10 years ago, was G.E.B. and I like everything about it, first
link |
It's just beautifully written and it's so old school and so somewhat outdated a little
link |
But I think the ideas in it about the fact that a few meaningless components can come
link |
together and create meaning that we can't even understand.
link |
This emerging thing, I mean complexity, the whole science of complexity and that beauty,
link |
intelligence, all interesting things about this world emerge.
link |
Yeah and yeah, the Godel theorems and just thinking about like what even these formal
link |
systems, something can be created that we can't quite yet understand.
link |
And that from my romantic standpoint was always just, that is why it's important to, maybe
link |
I should try to work on these systems and try to build an AI.
link |
Yes I'm not an engineer, yes I don't really know how it works, but I think that something
link |
comes out of it that's pure poetry and I know a little bit about that.
link |
Something magical comes out of it that we can't quite put a finger on.
link |
That's why that book was really fundamental for me, just for, I don't even know why, it
link |
was just all about this little magic that happens.
link |
So that's one, probably the most important book for Replica was Carl Rogers on becoming
link |
And that's really, and so I think when I think about our company, it's all about there's
link |
so many little magical things that happened over the course of working on it.
link |
For instance, I mean the most famous chatbot that we learned about when we started working
link |
on the company was Eliza, which was Weisenbaum, the MIT professor that built a chatbot that
link |
would listen to you and be a therapist.
link |
And I got really inspired to build Replica when I read Carl Rogers on becoming a person.
link |
And then I realized that Eliza was mocking Carl Rogers.
link |
It was Carl Rogers back in the day.
link |
But I thought that Carl Rogers ideas are, they're simple and they're not, they're very
link |
simple, but they're maybe the most profound thing I've ever learned about human beings.
link |
And that's the fact that before Carl Rogers, most therapy was about seeing what's wrong
link |
with people and trying to fix it or show them what's wrong with you.
link |
And it was all built on the fact that most people are, all people are fundamentally flawed.
link |
We have this broken psyche and therapy is just an instrument to shed some light on that.
link |
And Carl Rogers was different in a way that he finally said that, well, it's very important
link |
for therapy to work is to create this therapeutic relationship where you believe fundamentally
link |
and inclination to positive growth that everyone deep inside wants to grow positively and change.
link |
And it's super important to create this space and this therapeutic relationship where you
link |
give unconditional positive regard, deep understanding, allowing someone else to be a separate person,
link |
And you also try to be as genuine as possible in it.
link |
And then for him, that was his own journey of personal growth.
link |
And that was back in the sixties.
link |
And even that book that is coming from years ago, there's a mention that even machines
link |
can potentially do that.
link |
And I always felt that, you know, creating the space is probably the most, the biggest
link |
gift we can give to each other.
link |
And that's why the book was fundamental for me personally, because I felt I want to be
link |
learning how to do that in my life.
link |
And maybe I can scale it with, you know, with these AI systems and other people can get
link |
So I think Carl Rogers, it's a pretty dry and a bit boring book, but I think the idea
link |
Would you recommend others try to read it?
link |
I think for, just for yourself, for as a human, not as an AI, as a human, it's, it is, it
link |
is just, and for him, that was his own path of his own personal, of growing personally
link |
over years, working with people like that.
link |
And so it was work and himself growing, helping other people grow and growing through that.
link |
And that's fundamentally what I believe in with our work, helping other people grow,
link |
and ourselves, ourselves, trying to build a company that's all built on those principles,
link |
you know, having a good time, allowing some people who work with to grow a little bit.
link |
So these two books, and then I would throw in, what we have on our, in our, in our office,
link |
when we started a company in Russia, we put a neon sign in our office because we thought
link |
that's the recipe for success.
link |
If we do that, we're definitely going to wake up as a multi billion dollar company.
link |
It was the Ludwig Wittgenstein quote, the limits of my language are the limits of my
link |
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
link |
And I love the Tractatus.
link |
I think it's just, it's just a beautiful, it's a book by Wittgenstein.
link |
And I would recommend that too, even although he himself didn't believe in that by the end
link |
of his lifetime and debunked these ideas.
link |
But I think I remember once an engineer came in 2012, I think with 13, a friend of ours
link |
who worked with us and then went on to work at DeepMind and he gave, talked to us about
link |
And I saw that I'm like, wow, that's, you know, they, they wanted to translate language
link |
into, you know, some other representation.
link |
And that seems like some, you know, somehow all of that at some point, I think we'll come
link |
into this one, to this one place.
link |
Somehow it just all feels like different people think about similar ideas in different times
link |
from absolutely different perspectives.
link |
And that's why I like these books.
link |
In the midst of our language is the limit of our world.
link |
And we still have that neon sign, it's very hard to work with this red light in your face.
link |
I mean, on the, on the Russian side of things, in terms of language, the limits of language
link |
being the limit of our world, you know, Russian is a beautiful language in some sense.
link |
There's wit, there's humor, there's pain.
link |
We don't have time to talk about it much today, but I'm going to Paris to talk to Dostoyevsky
link |
Tolstoy translators.
link |
I think it's this fascinating art, like art and engineering, that means such an interesting
link |
But so from the replica perspective, do you, what do you think about translation?
link |
How difficult it is to create a deep, meaningful connection in Russian versus English?
link |
How you can translate the two languages?
link |
I think we're two different people in different languages.
link |
Even I'm, you know, thinking about, there's actually some research on that.
link |
I looked into that at some point because I was fascinated by the fact that what I'm talking
link |
about with, what I was talking about with my Russian therapist has nothing to do with
link |
what I'm talking about with my English speaking therapist.
link |
It's two different lives, two different types of conversations, two different personas.
link |
The main difference between the languages are, with Russian and English is that Russian,
link |
well English is like a piano.
link |
It's a limited number of a lot of different keys, but not too many.
link |
And Russian is like an organ or something.
link |
It's just something gigantic with so many different keys and so many different opportunities
link |
to screw up and so many opportunities to do something completely tone deaf.
link |
It is just a much harder language to use.
link |
It has way too much flexibility and way too many tones.
link |
What about the entirety of like World War II, communism, Stalin, the pain of the people
link |
like having been deceived by the dream, like all the pain of like just the entirety of
link |
Is that in the language too?
link |
Does that have to do?
link |
I mean, we have words that don't have direct translation that to English that are very
link |
much like we have, which is sort of like to hold a grudge or something, but it doesn't
link |
have, it doesn't, you don't need to have anyone to do it to you.
link |
It's just your state.
link |
You just feel like that.
link |
You feel like betrayed by other people basically, but it's not that and you can't really translate
link |
And I think that's super important.
link |
There are very many words that are very specific, explain the Russian being, and I think it
link |
can only come from a nation that suffered so much and saw institutions fall time after
link |
time after time and you know, what's exciting, maybe not exciting, exciting the wrong word,
link |
but what's interesting about like my generation, my mom's generation, my parents generation,
link |
that we saw institutions fall two or three times in our lifetime and most Americans have
link |
never seen them fall and they just think that they exist forever, which is really interesting,
link |
but it's definitely a country that suffered so much and it makes, unfortunately when I
link |
go back and I, you know, hang out with my Russian friends, it makes people very cynical.
link |
They stop believing in the future.
link |
I hope that's not going to be the case for so long or something's going to change again,
link |
but I think seeing institutions fall is a very traumatic experience.
link |
That's very interesting and what's on 2020 is a very interesting, do you think a civilization
link |
See, I'm a very practical person.
link |
We're speaking in English.
link |
So like you said, you're a different person in English and Russian.
link |
So in Russian you might answer that differently, but in English, yeah.
link |
I'm an optimist and I generally believe that there is all, you know, even although the
link |
perspectives are grim, there's always a place for a miracle.
link |
I mean, it's always been like that with my life.
link |
So yeah, my life has been, I've been incredibly lucky and things just, miracles happen all
link |
the time with this company, with people I know, with everything around me.
link |
And so I didn't mention that book, but maybe In Search of Miraculous or In Search for Miraculous
link |
or whatever the English translation for that is, good Russian book for everyone to read.
link |
I mean, if you put good vibes, if you put love out there in the world, miracles somehow
link |
I believe that too, or at least I believe that, I don't know.
link |
Let me ask the most absurd, final, ridiculous question of, we've talked about life a lot.
link |
What do you think is the meaning of it all?
link |
What's the meaning of life?
link |
I mean, my answer is probably going to be pretty cheesy.
link |
But I think the state of love is once you feel it, in a way that we've discussed it
link |
I'm not talking about falling in love, where...
link |
To yourself, to other people, to something, to the world.
link |
That state of bliss that we experience sometimes, whether through connection with ourselves,
link |
with our people, with the technology, there's something special about those moments.
link |
So I would say, if anything, that's the only...
link |
If it's not for that, then for what else are we really trying to do that?
link |
I don't think there's a better way to end it than talking about love.
link |
Eugenia, I told you offline that there's something about me that felt like this...
link |
Talking to you, meeting you in person would be a turning point for my life.
link |
I know that might sound weird to hear, but it was a huge honor to talk to you.
link |
I hope we talk again.
link |
Thank you so much for your time.
link |
Thank you so much, Lex.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eugenia Cuida, and thank you to our sponsors,
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DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App.
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Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, follow
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on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan.
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The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth that there's no reason to
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deceive ourselves with pretty stories of which there's little good evidence.
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Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability is to look death in the eye and to be grateful
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every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.