The following is a conversation with Eugenia Kuida, cofounder of Replica, which is an app

that allows you to make friends with an artificial intelligence system, a chatbot, that learns

to connect with you on an emotional, you could even say, a human level by being a friend.

For those of you who know my interest in AI and views on life in general, know that Replica and

Eugenia's line of work is near and dear to my heart. The origin story of Replica is grounded

in a personal tragedy of Eugenia losing her close friend, Roman Mazurenki, who was killed

crossing the street by a hit and run driver in late 2015. He was 34. The app started as a way

to grieve the loss of a friend by trading a chatbot and your old net on text messages between

Eugenia and Roman. The rest is a beautiful human story as we talk about with Eugenia.

When a friend mentioned Eugenia's work to me, I knew I had to meet her and talk to her. I felt

before, during, and after that this meeting would be an important one in my life. And it was. I think

in ways that only time will truly show, to me and others. She is a kind and brilliant person.

It was an honor and a pleasure to talk to her. Quick summary of the sponsors, DoorDash, Dollar

Shave Club, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support

this podcast. As a side note, let me say that deep meaningful connection between human beings

and artificial intelligence systems is a lifelong passion for me. I'm not yet sure where that passion

will take me, but I decided some time ago that I will follow it boldly and without fear, just as

far as I can take it. With a bit of hard work and a bit of luck, I hope I'll succeed in helping

build AI systems that have some positive impact on the world and on the lives of a few people out

there. But also, it is entirely possible that I am in fact one of the chatbots that Eugenia

and the replica team have built. And this podcast is simply a training process for the neural net

that's trying to learn to connect to human beings. One episode at a time. In any case,

I wouldn't know if I was or wasn't. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you. If you enjoy this thing,

subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,

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first, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education

for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Eugenia Kuida.

Okay, before we talk about AI and the amazing work you're doing, let me ask you ridiculously,

we're both Russian, so let me ask you a ridiculously romanticized Russian question.

Do you think human beings are alone, fundamentally, on a philosophical level? In our

existence, when we go through life, do you think just the nature of our life is loneliness?

Yeah, so we have to read Dostoevsky at school, as you probably know.

In Russian? Yeah. I mean, it's part of your school program. So I guess if you read that,

then you sort of have to believe that. You're made to believe that you're fundamentally alone,

and that's how you live your life. How do you think about it? You have a lot of friends,

but at the end of the day, do you have like a longing for connection with other people that's

maybe another way of asking it? Do you think that's ever fully satisfied?

I think we are fundamentally alone. We're born alone. We're die alone, but I view my whole life

as trying to get away from that, trying to not feel lonely. And again, we're talking about a

subjective way of feeling alone. It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any connections,

or you are actually isolated. You think it's a subjective thing, but again,

another absurd measurement wise thing. How much loneliness do you think there is in the world?

So like, if you see loneliness as a condition, how much of it is there? Do you think? I guess

how many, there's all kinds of studies and measures of how many people in the world feel

alone. There's all these measures of how many people are, self report, or just all these kinds

of different measures. But in your own perspective, how big of a problem do you think it is, sizewise?

Well, I'm actually fascinated by the topic of loneliness. I try to read about it as much as I

can. I think there's a paradox, because loneliness is not a clinical disorder. It's not

something that you can get your insurance to pay for if you're struggling with that.

Yet, it's actually proven in pretty tons of papers, tons of research around that. It is proven

that it's correlated with earlier life expectancy, shorter lifespan. In a way, right now, what

scientists would say that it's a little bit worse than VNOB, so not actually doing any

physical activity in your life. In terms of the impact on your health.

In terms of impact on your physiological health, yeah. So it basically puts you,

if you're constantly feeling lonely, your body responds like it's basically all the time under

stress. So it's always in this alert state. So it's really bad for you because it actually

drops your immune system and gets your response to inflammation. It's quite different. So all the

cardiovascular diseases actually responds to viruses, so it's much easier to catch a virus.

That's sad now that we're living in a pandemic and it's probably making us a lot more alone.

And it's probably weakening the immune system, making us more susceptible to the virus.

It's kind of sad.

Yeah, the statistics are pretty horrible around that. So around 30% of all millennials report

that they're feeling lonely constantly. 30%.

30%. And then it's much worse for Gen Z. And then 20% of millennials say that they feel lonely.

And they also don't have any close friends. And then I think 25% or so and then 20% would say

they don't even have acquaintances. That's in the United States?

That's in the United States. And I'm pretty sure that it's much worse everywhere else.

Like in the UK, I mean, it was widely tweeted and posted when they were talking about a minister

of loneliness that they wanted to point because four out of 10 people in the UK feel lonely.

I think that thing actually exists. So yeah, you will die sooner if you are lonely.

And again, this is only when we're only talking about your perception of loneliness or feeling

lonely. That is not objectively being fully socially isolated. However, the combination

of being fully socially isolated and not having many connections and also feeling lonely,

that's pretty much a deadly combination. So it strikes me bizarre or strange that

this is a wide known fact. And then there's really no one working really on that because it's

subclinical. It's not clinical. It's not something that you can will tell your doctor and get a

treatment or something. Yet it's killing us. Yeah. So there's a bunch of people trying to

evaluate, like try to measure the problem by looking at like how social media is affecting

loneliness and all that kind of stuff. So it's like measurement. Like if you look at the field of

psychology, they're trying to measure the problem and not that many people actually, but some,

but you're basically saying how many people are trying to solve the problem.

Like how would you try to solve the problem of loneliness? Like if you just stick to humans,

I mean, or basically not just the humans, but the technology that connects us humans,

do you think there's a hope for that technology to do the connection? Like are you on social media

much? Unfortunately. Do you find yourself like, again, if you're sort of introspect about

how connected you feel to other human beings, how not alone you feel, do you think social

media makes it better or worse? Maybe for you personally or in general?

I think it's easier to look at some stats. And I mean, gen Zs seem to be,

generosity seems to be much lonelier than millennials in terms of however they report

loneliness. They're definitely the most connected generation in the world. I mean,

I still remember life without an iPhone, without Facebook. They don't know that that ever existed

or at least don't know how it was. So that tells me a little bit about the fact that

might be this hyper connected world might actually make people feel lonelier. I don't

know exactly what the measurements are around that, but I would say in my personal experience,

I think it does make you feel a lot lonelier. Mostly, yeah, we're all super connected. But

I think loneliness, the feeling of loneliness doesn't come from not having any social connections

whatsoever. Again, tons of people that are in long term relationships experience bouts of

loneliness and continued loneliness. And it's more the question about the true connection about

actually being deeply seen, deeply understood. And in a way, it's also about your relationship

with yourself. In order to not feel lonely, you actually need to have a better relationship and

feel more connected to yourself than this feeling actually starts to go away a little bit. And then

you open up yourself to actually meeting other people in a very special way, not just at a friend

on Facebook kind of way. So just to briefly touch on it, I mean, do you think it's possible to form

that kind of connection with AI systems more down the line of some of your work? Do you think that's

engineering wise, a possibility to alleviate loneliness is not with another human, but with

an AI system? Well, I know that's that's a fact. That's what we're doing. And we see it and we

measure that and we see how people start to feel less lonely, talking to their virtual AI friend.

So basically a chatbot at the basic level, but could be more, like, do you have, I'm not even

speaking sort of about specifics, but do you have a hope, like, if you look 50 years from now,

do you have a hope that there's just like, AI's that are, like, optimized for, let me let me first

start, like, right now, the way people perceive AI, which is recommender systems for Facebook and

Twitter, social media, they see AI is basically destroying, first of all, the fabric of our

civilization, but second of all, making us more lonely. Do you see like a world where it's possible

to just have AI systems floating about that, like, make our life less lonely? Yeah, make us happy,

like, are putting good things into the world in terms of our individual lives.

Yeah, totally believe it. And that that's why we're also working on that.

I think we need to also make sure that what we're trying to optimize for we're actually measuring.

And it is a north star metric that we're going after. And all of our product and all of our

business models are optimized for that. Because you can talk, you know, a lot of products that talk

about, you know, making you feel less lonely, making you feel more connected, they're not really

measuring that. So they don't really know whether their users are actually feeling less lonely in

the long run, or feeling more connected in the long run. So I think it's really important to put

your measure it. Yeah, to measure it. What's a what's a good measurement of loneliness?

Well, so that's something that I'm really interested in. How do you measure that people

are feeling better, or that they're feeling less lonely? With loneliness, there's a scale,

there's a UCLA 20 and UCLA three recently scale, which is basically a questionnaire that you fill

out. And you can see whether in the long run, it's improving or not. And that does it capture the

momentary feeling of loneliness? Does it look in like the past month? Like, is it basically

self report? Does it try to sneak up on you? Try tricky to answer honestly, or something like that?

Well, what's yeah, I'm not familiar with the question. It is just asking you a few questions

like how often did you feel like lonely? Or how often do you feel connected to other people in

this last few couple weeks? It's similar to the self report questionnaires for depression, anxiety,

like pH Q9 and get seven. Of course, as any self report questionnaires, that's not necessarily very

precise or very well measured. But still, if you take a big enough population, you get them through

these questionnaires, you can see you can see positive dynamic. And so you basically, you put

people through questionnaires to see like, is this thing is our is what we're creating making

people happier? Yeah, we measure. So we measure two outcomes, one short term, right after the

conversation, we ask people whether this conversation made them feel better, worse or same.

This metric right now is at 80%. So 80% of all our conversations make people feel better.

But I should have done the questionnaire with you. You feel a lot worse after we've done this

conversation. That's actually fascinating. I should probably do that. But that's probably

do that. You should totally and aim for 80% aim to outperform your current state of the art AI system

in these human conversations. So we'll get to your work with replica. But let me continue on the

line of absurd questions. So you talked about, you know, deep connection of the humans, deep connection

with AI, meaningful connection. Let me ask about love, people make fun of me because I talk about

love all the time. But what, what do you think love is? Like maybe in the context of a meaningful

connection with somebody else, do you draw a distinction between love, like friendship,

and Facebook friends? Or is it a graduate? No, it's all the same. No, like, is it just a

gradual thing? Or is there something fundamental about us humans that seek like a really deep

connection with another human being? And what is that? What is love, Eugenia?

I'm going to just enjoy asking you these questions, seeing you struggle.

Thanks. Well, the way I see it, specifically, the way it relates to our work and the way it was

the way it inspired our work on replica. I think one of the biggest and the most precious gifts

we can give to each other now in 2020 as humans is this gift of deep empathetic understanding,

the feeling of being deeply seen. Like what does that mean? Like that you exist? Like somebody

acknowledging that? Somebody seeing you for who you actually are. And that's extremely,

extremely rare. I think that is that combined with unconditional positive regard,

belief and trust that you internally are always inclined for positive growth and believing you

in this way, letting you be a separate person at the same time. And this deep empathetic

understanding, for me, that's the combination that really creates something special, something

that people, when they feel it once, they will always long for it again and something that starts

huge fundamental changes in people. When we see that someone accepts us so deeply,

we start to accept ourselves and the paradox is that's when big changes start happening,

big fundamental changes in people start happening. So I think that is the ultimate therapeutic

relationship that is, and that might be in some way a definition of love. So acknowledging that

there's a separate person and accepting you for who you are. Now, on a slightly, and you mentioned

therapeutic, that sounds very like a very healthy view of love, but is there also like a, like,

you know, if we look at heartbreak and, you know, most love songs are probably about heartbreak,

right? Is that like the mystery, the tension, the danger, the fear of loss, you know, all of that,

what people might see in the negative light as like games or whatever, but just the dance of

human interaction, yeah, fear of loss and fear of like, you said, like, once you feel it once,

you long for it again, but you also, once you feel it once, you might, for many people,

they've lost it. So they fear losing it, they feel loss. So is that part of it? Like, you're

speaking like beautifully about like the positive things, but is it important to be able to be

afraid of losing it from an engineering perspective?

I mean, it's a huge part of it. And unfortunately, we all, you know, face it at some points in our

lives. I mean, I did. You want to go into details? How'd you get your heart broken?

Sure. Well, so mine is pretty straight, my source pretty straightforward there.

I did have a friend that was, you know, that at some point in my 20s, became really, really close

to me. And we became really close friends. I grew up pretty lonely. So in many ways when I'm building,

you know, these, these AI friends, I think about myself when I was 17, writing horrible poetry and,

you know, in my dial up modem at home. And, you know, and that was the feeling that I grew up with.

I was alone for a long time. I was a teenager. Where did you grow up?

In Moscow, in the outskirts of Moscow. So I just skateboarded during the day and come back home

and, you know, connect to the internet. And write poetry? And then write horrible poetry.

Was it love poems? All sorts of poems, obviously love poems. I mean, what other poetry can you

write when you're 17? Could be political or something. But yeah. But that was, you know,

that was kind of my, yeah, like deeply influenced by Joseph Brodsky and like all sorts of poets that

every 17 year old will will be looking, you know, looking at and reading. But yeah, that was my,

these were my teenage years. And I just never had a person that I thought would, you know,

take me as it is would accept me the way I am. And I just thought, you know, working and just

doing my thing and being angry at the world and being a reporter, I was an investigative reporter

working undercover and writing about people was my way to connect with, you know, with,

with others. I was deeply curious about every, everyone else. And I thought that, you know,

if I, if I go out there, if I write their stories, that means I'm more connected.

This is what this podcast is about, by the way. I'm desperate. I'm seeking connection.

I'm just kidding. Or am I, I don't know. So what, wait, reporter,

what, how did that make you feel more connected? I mean, you're still fundamentally pretty alone.

But you're always with other people, you know, you're always thinking about what other

place going to infiltrate, what other community can I write about, what other phenomenon can I

explore? And you sort of like a trickster, you know, and like, and a mythological character,

like creature that's just jumping between all sorts of different worlds and feel,

and feel sort of okay with, in all of them. So that was my dream job, by the way. That was like,

totally what I would have been doing if Russia was a different place.

And a little bit undercover. So like you weren't, you were trying to, like you said, mythological

creature trying to infiltrate. So try to be a part of the world. What are we talking about?

What kind of things did you enjoy writing about? I'd go work at a strip club or go.

Awesome. Okay. Well, I'd go work at a restaurant or just go write about, you know,

certain phenomenons or phenomenons or people in the city. And what, sorry to keep interrupting.

I'm the worst conversationalist. What stage of Russia is this? What, is this pre Putin,

post Putin? What, what was Russia like? Pre Putin is really long ago. This is Putin era.

That's the beginning of 2000s, 2010, 2007, eight, nine, 10. What were strip clubs like in Russia

and restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that early Russia that you were covering?

In those early 2000s, this was, there was still a lot of hope. There were still tons of hope that

you know, we're sort of becoming this western, westernized society. The restaurants were opening,

we were really looking at, you know, we're trying, we're trying to copy a lot of things from,

from the US, from Europe, bringing all these things in. Very enthusiastic about that.

So there was a lot of, you know, stuff going on. There was a lot of hope and dream for this,

you know, new Moscow that would be similar to, I guess, New York. I mean, to give you an idea in

year 2000 was the year when we had two movie theaters in Moscow. And there was this one first

coffee house that opened and it was like really big deal. By 2010, there were all sorts of things

everywhere. Almost like a chain, like a Starbucks type of coffee house or like you mean? Oh yeah,

like a Starbucks. I mean, I remember we were reporting on like, we were writing about the

opening of Starbucks. I think in 2007, that was one of the biggest things that happened in,

you know, in Moscow back in the time. Like that was worthy of a magazine cover and

that was definitely the, you know, the biggest talk of the town. Yeah, when was McDonald's?

Because I was still in Russia when McDonald's opened. That was in the 90s. I mean, yeah.

Oh yeah, I remember that very well. Yeah. Those were long, long lines. I think it was 1993 or

four, I don't remember. Did you actually go to McDonald's at that time? Did you do that?

I mean, that was a luxurious outing. That was definitely not something you do every day.

And also the line was at least three hours. So if you're going to McDonald's, that is not fast

food. That is like at least three hours in line. Yeah. And then no one is trying to eat fast after

that. Everyone is like trying to enjoy as much as possible. What's your memory of that? Oh,

it was insane. Positive? Extremely positive. It's a small strawberry milkshake and a hamburger and

small fries and my mom's there and sometimes I'll just, because I was really little, they'll just

let me run, you know, up the cashier and like cut the line, which is like, you cannot really do that

in Russia. So like for a lot of people, like a lot of those experiences might seem not very

fulfilling, you know, like it's on the verge of poverty, I suppose. But do you remember all that

time fondly? Like, because I do, like the first time I drank, you know, Coke, you know, all that

stuff, right? And just, yeah, the connection with other human beings in Russia, I remember,

I remember really positively. Like, how do you remember what the 90s and then the Russia you

were covering, just the human connections you had with people and the experiences?

Well, my, my parents were both, both physicists, my grandparents were both, well, my grandfather

was a nuclear physicist, a professor at the university, my dad worked at Chernobyl when

I was born in Chernobyl, analyzing kind of the everything after the explosion. And then I remember

and they were so they were making sort of enough money in the Soviet Union, so they were not,

you know, extremely poor or anything. It was pretty prestigious to be a professor,

uh, the dean and the university. And then I remember my grandfather started making $100 a month

after, you know, in the 90s. So then I remember we started our main line of work would be to go to

our little tiny country house, get a lot of apples there from apple trees, bring them back to,

to, to the city and sell them in the street. So me and my nuclear physicist grandfather were

just standing there and he'd selling those apples the whole day because that would make

you more money than, you know, working at the university. And then he'll just tell me to try to

teach me, um, you know, something about planets and whatever the particles and stuff. And, you know,

I'm not smart at all. So I could never understand anything. But I was interested as a journalist,

kind of type interested. But that was my memory. And you know, I'm happy that I wasn't, um, I

I somehow got spared that I was probably too young to remember any of the traumatic stuff. So

the only thing I really remember had this bootleg that was very traumatic. Had this bootleg

Nintendo, which was called was called dandy in Russia. So 1993, there was nothing to eat. Like

even if you had any money, you would go to the store and there was no food. I don't know if you

remember that. And our friend had a restaurant like a government, half government owned something

restaurant. So they always had supplies. So he exchanged a big bag of weed for this Nintendo,

the bootleg Nintendo. And then I remember very fondly because I think it was nine or

something like that. And we're seven traumatic. We just got it. And I was playing it. And there

was this, you know, dandy TV show. Yeah. So it's a positive sense. You mean like, like a definitive

well, they took it away and gave me a bag of weed instead. And I cried like my eyes out for

days and days and days. Oh, no. And then, you know, as a, and my dad said, we're going to like

exchange it back in a little bit. So you keep the little gun, you know, the one that you shoot

the ducks with. So I'm like, okay, I'm keeping the gun. So sometimes it's going to come back.

But then they exchanged the gun as well for some sugar or something. I was so pissed. I was like,

I didn't want to eat for days after that. I'm like, I don't want your food. Give me my Nintendo back.

That was extremely traumatic. But, you know, I was happy that that was my only traumatic

experience. You know, my dad had to actually go to Chernobyl with a bunch of 20 year olds. He was

20 when he went to Chernobyl. And that was right after the explosion. No one knew anything. The

whole crew he went with all of them are dead now. I think there was this one guy still

alive that was still alive for the last few years. I think he died a few years ago now.

My dad somehow luckily got back earlier than everyone else. But just the fact that that was the,

and I was always like, well, how did they send you? I was only, I was just born, you know,

you had a newborn talk about paternity leave. And like, but that's who they took because they

didn't know whether you would be able to have kids when you come back. So they took the ones with

kids. So him with some guys went to, and I'm just thinking of me, when I was 20, I was so

sheltered from any problems whatsoever in life. And then my dad, his 21st birthday at the reactor,

you like work three hours a day, you sleep the rest. And, and I, yeah, so I played with a lot

of toys from Chernobyl. What are your memories of Chernobyl in general, like the bigger context,

you know, because of that HBO show is the world's attention turned to it once again.

Like, what are your thoughts about Chernobyl? Did Russia screw that one up? Like,

you know, there's probably a lot of lessons about our modern times with

data about coronavirus and all that kind of stuff. It seems like there's a lot of misinformation.

There's a lot of people kind of trying to hide whether they screwed something up or not,

as it's very understandable, it's very human, very wrong, probably. But obviously,

Russia was probably trying to hide that they screwed things up. Like, what are your thoughts

about that time, personal and general? I mean, I was born when the explosion happened. So,

actually a few months after, so of course, I don't remember anything, apart from the fact that my

dad would bring me tiny toys, plastic things that would just go crazy, haywire when you, you know,

put the gig or thing to it. My mom was like, just nuclear about that. She was like, what are you

bringing? You should not do that. She was nuclear, very nice. Absolutely. Well, but yeah, but the

TV show was just phenomenal. It's definitely, first of all, it's incredible how that was made

not by the Russians, but someone else, but capturing so well everything about our country.

It felt a lot more genuine that most of the movies and TV shows that are made now in Russia are

just so much more genuine. And most of my friends in Russia were just incomplete all about the

show, but I think the, how good of a job they did, phenomenal, but also the apartments. There's

something. Yeah, the set design. I mean, Russians can't do that. We, you know, but you see everything

and it's like, well, that's exactly how it was. So I don't know that show. I don't know what to

think about that because it's British accents, British actors of a person. I forgot who created

the show. I'm not, but I remember reading about him and he's not, he doesn't even feel like,

like there's no Russia in this history. No, he did like super bad or something like that. Or like,

I don't know, whatever that thing about the bachelor party in Vegas,

number four and five or something were the ones that he worked with. Yeah. But so he,

it made me feel really sad for some reason that if a person, obviously a genius could go in and

just study and just be extreme attention to detail, they can do a good job. It made me think like,

why don't other people do a good job of this? Like about Russia, like there's so little about

Russia. There's so few good films about the Russian side of World War II of, I mean, there's so much

interesting, evil and not and beautiful moments in the history of the 20th century in Russia

that feels like there's not many good films on from the Russian. You would expect something from

the Russians. Well, they keep making these propaganda movies now. Oh, no. Unfortunately.

But yeah, Chernobyl was such a perfect TV show. I think capturing really well,

it's not about like even the set design, which was phenomenal, but just capturing all the problems

that exist now with the country and like focusing on the right things. Like if you build the whole

country on a lie, that's what's going to happen. And that's just this very simple kind of thing.

Yeah. And did you have your dad talked about it to you? Like his thoughts on the experience?

He never talks. He's this kind of Russian man that just, my husband who's American,

and he asked him a few times like, Igor, how did you, but why did you say yes? Or like,

why did you decide to go? You could have said, no, not go to Chernobyl. Why would like a person

that's what you do? You cannot say no. Yeah. It's just like a Russian way.

It's the Russian way. Men don't talk that much. They're downsides and upsides for that.

Yeah. That's the truth. Okay. So back to post Putin Russia.

Or maybe we skipped a few steps along the way, but you were trying to do, to be a journalist

in that time. What was Russia like at that time? Post said 2007 Starbucks type of thing.

What else? What else was Russia like then? I think there was just hope. There was this

big hope that we're going to be friends with the United States and we're going to be friends with

Europe and we're just going to be also country like those with bike lanes and parks and

everything's going to be urbanized. Again, we're talking about 90s where people would be shot in

the street and I sort of have a fond memory of going into a movie theater and coming out of it

after the movie and the guy that I saw on the stairs was like either shot. Again, it was like

a thing in the 90s that would be happening. People were getting shot here and there.

Tons of violence. Tons of just basically mafia mobs in the streets. And then the 2000s were

like things just got cleaned up. Oil went up and the country started getting a little bit richer.

The 90s were so grim mostly because the economy was in shambles and oil prices were not high,

so the country didn't have anything. We defaulted in 1998 and the money kept jumping back and

forth. First, there were millions of rubbles, then it got to like thousands, then it was

one rubble with something, then again to millions. It was like crazy town.

And then the 2000s were just these years of stability in a way and the country getting

a little bit richer because of, again, oil and gas. And we started to look at specifically in

Moscow and St. Petersburg to look at other cities in Europe and New York and U.S. and

trying to do the same in our small kind of city towns there.

What were your thoughts of Putin at the time?

Well, in the beginning, he was really positive. Everyone was very positive about Putin. He was

young. He was very energetic. He also immediately, somewhat compared to, well, that was not way

before the shortlist era. The shortlist era. Okay, so he didn't start off shortly. When did

the shortlist era? It's like the propaganda of riding a horse, fishing.

2010, 11, 12.

Yeah. That's my favorite. People talk about the favorite beetles. That's my favorite

Putin is the shortlist Putin.

No, I remember very, very clearly 1996 where Americans really helped Russia with elections

and Yeltsin got reelected, thankfully so, because there's a huge threat that actually

the communists will get back to power. They were a lot more popular and then a lot of American

experts, political experts and campaign experts descended on Moscow and helped Yeltsin actually

get the presidency, the second term for the presidency, but Yeltsin was not feeling great

by the end of his second term. He was alcoholic. He was really old. He was falling off

the stages when he was talking. People were looking for a fresh face for someone who's

going to continue Yeltsin's work, but who's going to be a lot more energetic and a lot more

active, young, efficient, maybe. That's what we all saw in Putin back in the day.

I'd say that everyone, absolutely everyone in Russia in early 2000s who was not a communist

would be, yeah, Putin's great. We have a lot of hopes for him.

What are your thoughts, and I promise we'll get back to, first of all, your love story

and second of all, AI. Well, what are your thoughts about communism? The 20th century,

I apologize. I'm reading the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Oh my God.

So I'm really steeped into World War II and Stalin and Hitler and just these dramatic

personalities that brought so much evil to the world. But it's also interesting to politically

think about these different systems and what they've led to. Russia is one of the beacons

of communism in the 20th century. What are your thoughts about communism having

experienced it as a political system? I mean, I have only experienced it a little bit,

but mostly through stories and through seeing my parents and my grandparents who lived through that.

I mean, it was horrible. It was just plain horrible. It was just awful.

You think there's something... I mean, it sounds nice on paper. So the drawbacks of

capitalism is that eventually, it's the point of a slippery slope. Eventually, it creates

a disparity, inequality of wealth inequality. I guess it's hypothetical at this point, but

eventually capitalism leads to humongous inequality. And then some people argue that

that's a source of unhappiness. It's not like absolute wealth of people. It's the fact that

there's a lot of people much richer than you. There's a feeling of like, that's where unhappiness

can come from. So the idea of communism or these sort of Marxism is not allowing that kind of

slippery slope. But then you see the actual implementations of it and stuff seems to go

wrong very badly. What do you think that is? Why does it go wrong? What is it about human

nature? If you look at Chernobyl, these kinds of bureaucracies that were constructed,

is there something... Do you think about this much of why it goes wrong?

Well, it's not that everyone was equal. Obviously, the government and everyone close to that were

the bosses. So it's not like fully, I guess, this dream of equal life. So then I guess the

situation that Russia had in the Soviet Union, it was more a bunch of really poor people without

any way to make any significant fortune or build anything living under constant surveillance.

Surveillance from other people, like you can't even do anything that's not fully approved by the

dictatorship, basically. Otherwise, your neighbor will write a letter and you'll go to jail.

Absolute absence of actual law. It's a constant state of fear. You didn't own anything. You

couldn't go travel. You couldn't read anything western or you couldn't make a career, really,

unless you're working in the military complex, which is why most of the scientists were so well

regarded. I come from both my dad and my mom come from families of scientists and they were

really well regarded, as you know, obviously. Because there's a lot of value to them being

well regarded. Because they were developing things that could be used in the military.

So that was very important. That was the main investment. But it was miserable. It was miserable.

That's why a lot of Russians now live in the state of constant PTSD. That's why we want to

buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. Definitely. As soon as we have the opportunity, we just got to it

finally that we can own things. I remember the time that we got our first yogurts and that was

the biggest deal in the world. It was already in the 90s, by the way. What was your favorite food?

What was like, well, this is possible. Oh, fruit. Because we only had apples, bananas,

and watermelons, whatever people would grow in the Soviet Union. So there were no

pineapples or papaya or mango. You've never seen those fruit things. Those were so

ridiculously good. And obviously, you could not get any strawberries in winter or anything that's

not seasonal. So that was a really big deal. Seeing all these fruit things. Yeah, me too,

actually. I don't know. I don't think I have too many demons or addictions or so on. But I think

I've developed an unhealthy relationship with fruit that I still struggle with. Oh, you can get any

type of fruit, right? Also, these weird fruit like dragon fruit or something. All kinds of

different types of peaches, like cherries were killer for me. I know you say we had bananas and

so on, but I don't remember having the kind of banana. When I first came to this country,

the amount of banana, I literally got fat on bananas. Oh yeah, for sure. Delicious. And like

cherries, just the quality of the food. I was like, this is capitalism. That's pretty good.

It's delicious. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny. It's funny to read.

I don't know what to think of it. It's funny to think how an idea that's just written on paper

or when carried out amongst millions of people, how that gets actually, when it becomes reality,

what it actually looks like. Sorry, but I've been studying Hitler a lot recently,

and going through Mein Kampf, he pretty much wrote out of Mein Kampf everything he was going to do.

Unfortunately, most leaders, including Stalin didn't read it. But it's kind of terrifying and

I don't know. And amazing in some sense that you can have some words on paper,

and they can be brought to life, and they can either inspire the world or they can destroy

the world. And yeah, there's a lot of lessons to study in history that I think people don't study

enough now. One of the things I'm hoping with, I've been practicing Russian a little bit,

I'm hoping to sort of find, rediscover the beauty and the terror of Russian history

through this stupid podcast by talking to a few people. So anyway, I just feel like so much was

forgotten. So much was forgotten. I'll probably try to convince myself that you're a super busy

and super important person. Well, I'm going to try to befriend you to try to become a better Russian

because I feel like I'm a shitty Russian. Not that busy. So I can totally be a Russian Sherpa.

Yeah, but love. You're talking about your early days of being a little bit alone and finding a

connection with the world through being a journalist. What did love come into that?

I guess finding for the first time, some friends, it's a very simple story, some friends that all

of a sudden we, I guess we're at the same place with our lives. We're 25, 26, I guess. And

then somehow remember, and we just got really close and somehow remember this one day,

where it was one day in summer that we just stayed out outdoor the whole night and just

talked and for some unknown reason, it just felt for the first time that someone could

see me for who I am. And it just felt extremely good. And we fell asleep outside and just talking

and it was raining, it was beautiful, sunrise and it's really cheesy. But at the same time,

we just became friends in a way that I've never been friends with anyone else before.

And I do remember that before and after that you have this unconditional family sort of

and it gives you tons of power. It just basically gives you this tremendous power to do things in

your life and to change positively on many different levels.

Power because you could be yourself. At least you know that somewhere you can be

just yourself. If you don't need to pretend, you don't need to be great at work or tell some story

or sell yourself in somewhere or another. And so we became just really close friends and

then in a way, I started a company because he had a startup and I felt like I kind of want to

start up. It felt really cool. I don't know what I would really do, but I felt like I kind of need

a startup. Okay. So that pulled you into the startup world. Yeah. And then this closest friend

of mine died. We actually moved here to San Francisco together and then we went back for a visa to

Moscow and we lived together were roommates and we came back and he got hit by a car right in front

of Kremlin, you know, next to the river and died the same day in the hospital. So

and you've moved to America at that point? At that point, I was what about him? What about

Roman? Him too. He actually moved first. So I was always sort of trying to do what he was doing. So

I didn't like that he was already here and I was still, you know, in Moscow and we weren't

hanging out together all the time. So was he in San Francisco? Yeah, we were roommates.

So he just visited Moscow for a little bit? We went back for our visas. We had to get a stamp

in our passport for our work visas and the embassy was taken a little longer. So we stayed there for

a couple of weeks. What happened? So how did he die? He was crossing the street and the car was

going really fast and way over the speed limit and just didn't stop on the pedestrian cross

on the zebra and just ran over him. When was this? It was in 2015 on 28th of November. So it was

just a long ago now. But at the time, you know, I was 29. So for me, it was the first kind of

meaningful death in my life. You know, I had both sets of grandparents at the time. I didn't see

anyone so close die and death sort of existed, but as a concept. But definitely not as something

that would be, you know, happening to us anytime soon. And specifically our friends,

because we were, you know, we're still in our 20s or early 30s, and it still felt like the whole

life is, you know, you could still dream about ridiculous things even. So that was, it was just

really, really abrupt, I'd say. What did it feel like to lose him? Like that feeling of loss?

You talked about the feeling of love, having power. What is the feeling of loss, if you like?

Well, in Buddhism, there's this concept of Samaya where something really,

like, huge happens and then you can see very clearly. I think that was it. Like, basically

something changed so, changed me so much in such a short period of time that I could just see really,

really clearly what mattered or what not. Well, I definitely saw that whatever I was doing at work,

what didn't matter at all, and some of the things. And it was just this big realization,

what this very, very clear vision of what life's about.

You still miss him today?

Yeah, for sure. For sure. It was just this constant. I think it was, he was really important

for me and for our friends for many different reasons. And I think one of them,

being that we didn't just say goodbye to him, but we sort of said goodbye to our youth in a way,

it was like the end of an era and so many different levels. The end of Moscow as we knew it,

the end of us living through our 20s and kind of dreaming about the future.

Do you remember like last several conversations? Is there moments with him that stick out that

will kind of haunt you? And you're just when you think about him?

Yeah, well, his last year here in San Francisco, he was pretty depressed for,

as his startup was not going really anywhere. And he wanted to do something else. He wanted to do

build. He played with a bunch of ideas, but the last one he had was around

building a startup around death. So he applied to Y Combinator with the video that I had on my

computer. And it was all about disrupting death, thinking about new cemeteries more

biologically, like things that could be better biologically for humans. And at the same time,

having those digital avatars, these kind of AI avatars that would store all the memory about

a person that he could interact with. What year was this? 2015. Well, right before his death.

So it was like a couple of months before that he recorded that video. And so I found out my

computer was in our living room. He never got in, but he was thinking about it a lot somehow.

Does it have the digital avatar idea? Yeah.

That's so interesting. Well, he just says, well, the fish has this idea and he talks about,

like, I want to rethink how people grieve and how people talk about death.

Well, I was interested in this. Maybe someone who's depressed

is naturally inclined thinking about that. But I just felt this year in San Francisco,

we just had so much, I was going through a hard time, he was going through a hard time.

And we were definitely, I was trying to make him just happy somehow to make him feel better.

And it felt like this, I don't know, I just felt like I was taking care of him a lot. And

then he almost started to feel better. And then that happened. And I don't know, I just fell,

I just fell lonely again, I guess. And that was coming back to San Francisco in December,

I helped organize the funeral, help his parents. And I came back here and it was a really lonely

apartment, a bunch of his clothes everywhere, and Christmas time. And I remember I had a board

meeting with my investors, and I just couldn't talk about like, had to pretend everything's okay.

And, you know, just working on this company. Yeah, it was definitely very, very tough, tough time.

Do you think about your own mortality? You said, you know, we're young, the

the possibility of doing all kinds of crazy things is still out there. It's still

before us, but it can end any moment. Do you think about your own ending at any moment?

Unfortunately, I think about way too, about a way too much. It's somehow after Roman, like,

every year after that, I started losing people that I really love. I lost my grandfather next year.

My, you know, the person who would explain to me, you know, what the universe is made of.

Why are you selling apples? Well, selling apples. And then I lost another close friend of mine. And

it just made me very scared. I have tons of fear about death. That's what makes me not fall asleep

oftentimes and just go in loops. And then as my therapist recommended me, I opened up some

nice calming images with the voiceover. And it calms me down.

How for sleep? Yeah, I'm really scared of death. This is a big, I definitely have tons of,

I guess, some pretty big trauma about it and still working through.

There's a philosopher, Ernest Becker, who wrote a book, The Nile of Death. I'm not sure if you're

familiar with any of those folks. There's a, in psychology, a whole field called terror management

theory. Sheldon, who's just done the podcast, he wrote the book. He was the, we talked for four

hours about death. A fear of death. But his whole idea is that Ernest Becker, I think, I find this

idea really compelling is that everything human beings have created, like our whole motivation

in life, is to create like escape death. It's to try to construct an illusion

of that we're somehow immortal. So like everything around us, this room, your startup,

your dreams, all everything you do is a kind of creation of a brain unlike any other mammal or

species is able to be cognizant of the fact that it ends for us. I think, so there's the question

of like the meaning of life that you look at like what drives us humans. And when I read Ernest

Becker that I highly recommend people read is the first time I, it felt like this is the right

thing at the core. Sheldon's work is called warm at the core. So he's saying it's, I think it's

William James, he's quoting or whoever, is like the thing, what is at the core of it all? Sure,

there's like love, you know, Jesus might talk about like love is at the core of everything. I

don't, you know, that's the open question. What's at the, you know, it's turtles, turtles, but it

can't be turtles all the way down. What's at the bottom? And Ernest Becker says the fear of death

and the way, in fact, because you said therapists and calming images, his whole idea is, you know,

we want to bring that fear of death as close as possible to the surface because it's,

and like meditate on that and use the clarity of vision that provides to, you know, to live a

more fulfilling life, to live a more honest life, to discover, you know, there's something about,

you know, being cognizant of the finiteness of it all that might result in the most fulfilling life.

So that's the, that's the dual of what you're saying, because you kind of said it's like, I

unfortunately think about it too much. It's a question whether it's good to think about it,

because I've, again, I talk way too much about love and probably death. And when I ask people,

friends, which is why I probably don't have many friends, are you afraid of death? I think most

people say they're not, they're not what they, they say they're, they're afraid, you know,

it's kind of almost like they see death as this kind of like a paper deadline or something, and

they're afraid not to finish the paper before the paper, like, like, I'm afraid not to finish

the goals I have. But it feels like they're not actually realizing that this thing ends,

this thing ends, like really realizing, like really thinking as Nietzsche and all these

philosophers, like thinking deeply about it, like the very thing that, you know, like when

you think deeply about something, you can just, you can realize that you haven't actually thought

about it. Yeah. And I, and when I think about death, it's like, it can be, it's terrifying.

If it feels like stepping outside into the cold, where it's freezing, and then I have to like

hurry back inside where it's warm. But like, I think there's something valuable about stepping

out there into the freezing cold. Definitely. When I talk to my mentor about it, he always tells me,

well, what dies? There's nothing there that can die. But I guess that requires,

well, in Buddhism, one of the concepts that are really hard to grasp and that people spend

older lives meditating on would be Anata, which is the concept of not self, and kind of thinking

that, you know, if you're not your thoughts, which you're obviously not your thoughts,

because you can observe them and not your emotions and not your body, then what is this? And if you

go really far, then finally you see that there's not self, there's this concept of not self. So

once you get there, how can that actually die? What is dying?

Right, you're just a bunch of molecules, star dust.

But that is very advanced spiritual work for me. I'm definitely just, definitely not. Oh my God,

no, I have, I think it's very, very useful. It's just the fact that maybe being so afraid is not

useful. And mine is more, I'm just terrified, like it's really makes me on a personal level.

On a personal level, I'm terrified. How do you overcome that?

I don't. I'm still trying to. Have pleasant images?

Well, pleasant images get me to sleep. And then during the day, I can distract myself

with other things, like talking to you. I'm glad we're both doing the same exact thing. Okay, good.

Is there other, like, is there moments since you've lost Roman that you had like moments of

like bliss and like that you've forgotten that you have achieved that Buddhist like level of

like what can possibly die. I'm part like losing yourself in the moment in the ticking

time of like this universe. He's just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it.

Well, that goes hand in hand. I remember, I think a day or two after he died, we went to

finally get his passport out of the embassy and we're driving around Moscow and it was,

you know, December, which is usually there's never a sun in Moscow in December.

And somehow it was an extremely sunny day and we were driving with close friend.

And I remember feeling for the first time maybe this just moment of incredible clarity and somehow

happiness, not like happy happiness, but happiness and just feeling that, you know,

I know what the universe is sort of about, whether it's good or bad. And it wasn't a sad feeling,

it was probably the most beautiful feeling that you can ever achieve. And you can only get it

when something, oftentimes when something traumatic like that happens. But also if you just,

you really spend a lot of time meditating and looking at the nature doing something that

really gets you there. But once you're there, I think when you summit a mountain, a really hard

mountain, you inevitably get there. That's just a way to get to the state. But once you're on this,

in this state, you can do really big things, I think. Yeah.

Sucks it doesn't last forever. So Bukowski talked about like love is a fog. I like,

it's when you wake up in the morning, it's there, but it eventually dissipates. It's really sad.

Nothing lasts forever. But I definitely like doing this push up and running thing. There's moments,

I had a couple moments, like I'm not a crier, I don't cry. But there's moments where I was like

facedown on the carpet. Like with tears in my eyes is interesting. And then that complete, like,

there's a lot of demons. I've got demons, had to face them funny how running makes you face your

demons. But at the same time, the flip side of that, there's a few moments where I was in bliss.

In bliss. And all of it alone, which is funny. It's beautiful. I like that. But definitely pushing

yourself physically, one of it for sure. Yeah. Like you said, I mean, you were speaking as a

metaphor of Mount Everest, but it also works like literally, I think physical endeavor somehow.

Yeah, there's something, I mean, war monkeys, apes, whatever, physical, there's a physical thing to

it. But there's something to this, pushing yourself physically, physically, but alone. That happens

when you're doing like things like you do, or straightness, like workouts, or, you know,

rolling extra cross the Atlantic, or marathons. That's why I love watching marathons. And,

you know, it's so boring. But you can see them getting there.

So the other thing, I don't know if you know, there's a guy named David Goggins. He's a,

he basically, so he's been either emailing the phone with me every day through this. I haven't

been exactly alone. But he, he's kind of, he's the, he's the devil on the devil's shoulder.

So he's like the worst possible human being in terms of giving you a, like he has, through

everything I've been doing, he's been doubling everything I do. So he, he's insane. He's a

this Navy SEAL person. He's wrote this book, Can't Hurt Me. He's basically one of the toughest

human beings on earth. He ran all these crazy ultra marathons in the desert. He set the world

record in a number of pull ups. He's just does everything where it's like, he, like, how can

I suffer today? He figures that out and does it. Yeah, that, whatever that is, that process of

self discovery is really important. I actually had to turn myself off from the internet mostly

because I started this like workout thing, like a happy go getter with my like headband and like,

like, just like, uh, cause a lot of people are like inspired and they're like, yeah, we're gonna

exercise with you. And I was like, yeah, great, you know, but then like, I realized that this,

this journey can't be done together with others. This has to be done alone. So out of the moments

of love, out of the moments of loss, can we talk about your journey of finding, I think, an incredible

idea, an incredible company and incredible system in replica? How did that come to be?

So yeah, so I was a journalist and then I went to business school for a couple of years to

just see if I can maybe switch gears and do something else with 23. And then I came back

and started working for a businessman in Russia who built the first 4G network in our country

and was very visionary and asked me whether I want to do fun stuff together. And we worked

on a bank. The idea was to build a bank on top of a telco. So that was 2011. And then I went to

so that was 2011 or 2012. And a lot of telecommunication company, mobile network operators

didn't really know what to do next in terms of, you know, new products, new revenue. And this big

idea was that, you know, you put a bank on top and then all work works out. Basically, a prepaid

account becomes your bank account and you can use it as your bank. So, you know, a third of a country

wakes up as your bank client. But we couldn't quite figure out what would be the main interface to

interact with the bank. The problem was that most people didn't have smart smartphones back in the

time. In Russia, the penetration of smartphones was low. People didn't use mobile banking or

online banking on their computers. So we figured out that SMS would be the best way because that

would work on feature phones. But that required some chatbot technology, which I didn't know

anything about, obviously. So I started looking into it and saw that there's nothing really,

well, there wasn't just nothing really. So the idea is to SMS be able to interact with a bank

account. Yeah. And then we thought, well, since you're talking to a bank account, why can't this,

can't we use more of, you know, some behavioral ideas and why can't this banking chatbot be nice

to you and really talk to you sort of as a friend, this way you develop more connection to it,

retention is higher, people don't churn. And so I went to very depressing Russian cities to test

it out. I went to, I remember three different towns to interview potential users. So people

use it for a little bit. Cool. And I went to talk to them. Pretty poor towns. Very poor towns,

mostly towns that were, you know, sort of factories, mono towns, they were building something and then

the factory went away and it was just a bunch of very poor people. And then we went to a couple

that weren't as dramatic, but still the one I remember really fondly was this woman that

worked at a glass factory and she talked to a chatbot. And she was talking about it,

and she started crying during the interview because she said, no one really cares for me that much.

And so to be clear, that was my only endeavor in programming that chatbot. So it was really

simple. It was literally just a few, if this then that rules and it was incredibly simplistic.

And still that made her feel something. And that really made her emotional. She said,

you know, I only have my mom and my husband and I don't have any more really in my life.

And it was very sad. But at the same time, I felt and we had more interviews in a similar vein.

And what I thought in the moment was like, well, it's not that the technology is ready,

because definitely in 2012 technology was not ready for that. But humans are ready,

unfortunately. So this project would not be about like tech capabilities would be more about

human vulnerabilities. But there's something so so powerful around about conversational AI that

I saw then that I thought was definitely worth putting in a lot of effort into. So in the end

of the day, we saw the banking project. But my then boss was also my mentor and really,

really close friend, told me, hey, I think there's something in it. And you should just

go work on it. And I was like, well, what product? I don't know what I'm building.

He said, you'll figure it out. And, you know, looking back at this, this is a horrible idea

to work on something without knowing what it was, which is maybe the reason why it took us

so long. But we just decided to work on the conversational tech to see what it, you know,

there were no chatbot constructors or programs or anything that would allow you to actually build

one at the time. That was the era of, by the way, Google Glass, which is why, you know,

some of the investors, like seed investors who talked with were like, oh, you should totally

build it for Google Glass. If not, we're not. I don't think that's interesting.

Did you bite on that idea?

No. Because I wanted to be to do text first, because I'm a journalist. So I was fascinated

by just texting. So you thought, so the emotional, that interaction that the woman had,

like, so do you think you could feel emotion from just text?

Yeah, I saw something in just this pure texting and also thought that we should first start

building for people who really need it versus people who have Google Glass,

if you know what I mean. And I felt like the early adopters of Google Glass

might not be overlapping with people who are really lonely and might need someone to talk to.

But then we really just focused on the tech itself. We just thought, what if we just,

you know, we didn't have a product idea in the moment. And we felt, what if we just look into

building the best conversational constructors, so to say, use the best tech available at the

time. And that was before the first paper about deep learning applied to dialogues,

which happened in 2015, in August 2015, which Google published.

Did you follow the work of Lobner Prize and like all the sort of non machine learning

chatbots? Yeah, what really struck me was that, you know, there was a lot of talk about

machine learning and deep learning, like big data was a really big thing. Everyone was saying,

you know, the business was big data. 2012 is the biggest gaggle competitions were, you know,

important. But that was really the kind of upheaval of people started talking about machine

learning a lot. But it was only about images or something else. And it was never about

conversation. As soon as I looked into the conversational tech, it was all about

something really weird and very outdated and very marginal and felt very hobbyist. It was all about

Lobner Prize, which was won by a guy who built a chatbot that talked like a Ukrainian teenager.

It was just a gimmick. And somehow people picked up those gimmicks. And then, you know, the most

famous chatbot at the time was Eliza from 1980s, which was really bizarre or a smarter child on aim.

The funny thing is, it felt at the time not to be that popular. And it still doesn't seem to be

that popular. Like people talk about the Turing test. People like talking about it philosophically.

Journos like writing about it. But as a technical problem, like people don't seem to really want

to solve the open dialogue. Like they, they're not obsessed with it. Even folks like, you know,

in Boston, the Alexa team, even they're not as obsessed with it as I thought they might be.

Why not? What do you think? So, you know what you felt like? You felt with that woman when she

felt something by reading the text. I feel the same thing. There's something here, what you felt.

I feel like Alexa folks and just the machine learning world doesn't feel that,

that there's something here. Because they see as a technical problem, it's not that interesting,

for some reason. It could be argued that maybe as a purely sort of natural language processing

problem, it's not the right problem to focus on. Because there's too much subjectivity. That,

that thing that the woman felt like crying, like if, if, if your benchmark includes a woman crying,

that doesn't feel like a good benchmark test. But to me, there's something there that's,

you can have a huge impact. But I don't think the machine learning world likes that, the human

emotion, the subjectivity of it, the fuzziness, the fact that with maybe a single word, you can

make somebody feel something deeply. What is that? It doesn't feel right to them. So, I don't know.

I don't, I don't know why that is. I'm, that's why I'm excited. When I discovered your work,

it feels wrong to say that. It's not like I'm, I'm giving myself props for, for Googling and for

becoming a, for, for, for our, I guess, mutual friend and introducing us. But I'm so glad that

you exist and what you're working on. But I have the same kind of, if we could just backtrack

a second, because I have the same kind of feeling that there's something here. In fact, I've been

working on a few things that are kind of crazy, very different from your work. I think, I think

they're, I think they're too crazy, but the, like what? I have to know. No, all right. We'll talk

about it more. I feel like it's harder to talk about things that have failed and are failing

while you're a failure. Like it's easier for you because you're already successful

on some measures. Tell it to my board. Well, you're, you're, I think, I think

you've demonstrated success in a lot of my projects. It's easier for you to talk about

failures for me. I'm in the bottom currently of the, of the success. You're way too humble.

No. So it's hard for me to know, but there's something there. There's something there.

And I think you're, you're exploring that and you're discovering that. Yeah. It's been,

so it's been surprising to me, but I, you've mentioned this idea that you, you thought it wasn't

enough to start a company or start efforts based on, it feels like there's something here.

Like, what did you mean by that? Like you should be focused on creating a, like you should have

a product in mind. Is that what you meant? It just took us a while to discover the product

because it all started with a hunch of like, of me, my mentor and just sitting around and he was

like, well, this, that's it. There's, that's the, you know, the whole of Grail is there. There's

like, there's something extremely powerful in, in, in conversations. And there's no one who's

working on machine conversation from the right angle, so to say. I feel like that's still true.

Am I crazy? Oh no, I totally feel that's still true, which is, I think it's mind blowing.

Yeah. You know what it feels like? I wouldn't even use the word conversation because I feel

like it's the wrong word. It's like a machine connection or something. I don't know.

Because conversation, you start drifting into natural language immediately. You start drifting

immediately into all the benchmarks that are out there. But I feel like it's like the personal

computer days of this. Like, I feel like we're like in the early days with the, the, the Wozniak and

all of them, like where it was the same kind of, it was a very small niche group of people who are, who

are all kind of Lobner price type people. Yeah. And hobbyists, but like not even hobbyists with

big dreams. Like, you know, hobbyists with a dream to trick like a jury. Yeah. It's like a weird,

by the way, by the way, very weird. So if you think about conversations, first of all, when I

have great conversations with people, I'm not trying to test them. So for instance, if I try to break

them, if I'm actually playing along, I'm part of it. If I was trying to break it, break this person

or test whether he's going to give me a good conversation, it would have never happened. So

the whole, the whole problem with testing conversations is that you can put it in front

of a jury, because then you have to go into some touring test mode where is it responding to all

my factual questions, right? Or so it really has to be something in the field where people are

actually talking to it, because they want to, not because we're just trying to break it. And

it's working for them. Because this, the weird part of it is that it's, it's very subjective. It

takes two to tango here fully. If you're not trying to have a good conversation, if you're

trying to test it, then it's going to break. I mean, any person would break, to be honest,

if I'm not trying to even have a conversation with you, you're not going to give it to me.

If I keep asking you like some random questions or jumping from topic to topic, that wouldn't be,

which I'm probably doing, but that probably wouldn't contribute to the conversation. So I think the

problem of testing, so there should be some other metric, how do we evaluate whether that

conversation was powerful or not, which is what we actually started with. And I think those

measurements exist, and we can't test on those. But what really struck us back in the day and

what's still eight years later is still not resolved. And I'm not seeing tons of groups

working on it. Maybe I just don't know about them. It's also possible. But the interesting part about

is that most of our days we spend talking, and we're not talking about like those conversations

are not turned on the lights or customer support problems or some other task oriented things.

These conversations are something else. And then somehow they're extremely important for us. And

when we don't have them, then we feel deeply unhappy, potentially lonely, which as we know,

creates tons of risk for our health as well. And so this is most of our hours as humans.

And some of them, no one's trying to replicate that.

And not even study it that well.

And not even study that well. So when we jumped into that in 2012, I looked first at like,

okay, what's the chatbot? What's the state of the art chatbot? And, you know, those were the

Lobner Prize days. But I thought, okay, so what about the science of conversation? Clearly,

there have been tons of, there have been tons of, you know, scientists or people that academics

that looked into the conversation. So if I want to know everything about it, I can just read about

it. And there's not much really, there's there are conversational analysts who are basically just

listening to speech to different conversations, annotating them. And then,

I mean, that's not really used for much. That's the, that's the field of theoretical

linguistics, which is like barely useful. It's very marginal, even in their space, no one really

is excited. And I've never met a theoretical, theoretical linguist, because I can't wait to

work on the conversation and analytics. That is just something very marginal, sort of applied to

like writing scripts for salesmen, when they analyze which conversation strategies were

most successful for sales. Okay, so that was not very helpful. Then I looked a little bit deeper,

and then there, you know, whether there were any books written on what, you know, really contributes

to a great conversation. That was really strange, because most of those were NLP books, which is

neurolinguistic programming, which is not the NLP that I was expecting to be, but was mostly

some psychologist Richard Bandler, I think, came up with that, who was this big guy in a

leather vest that could program your mind by talking to you and how to be charismatic and

charming and influential as people, all those books. Yeah, pretty much. But it was all about,

like, through conversation reprogramming you, so getting to some, so that was, I mean,

probably not very, very true. And that didn't seem working very much, even back in the day.

And then there were some other books, like, I don't know, mostly just self help books around

how to be the best conversationalist, or how to make people like you, or some other stuff like

Dale Carnegie, whatever. And then there was this one book, The Most Human Human by Brian

Christensen, that really was important for me to read back in the day, because he was on the

human side. He was taking part in the London Reprise, but not as a human who's not a jury,

but who's pretending to be, who's basically, you have to tell a computer from a human,

and he was the human. So you would either get him or a computer. And his whole book was about

how do people, what makes us human in conversation. And that was a little bit more interesting,

because at that at least someone started to think about what exactly makes me human in

conversation and makes people believe in that. But it was still about tricking. It was still

about imitation game. It was still about, okay, what kind of parlor tricks can we throw in the

conversation to make you feel like you're talking to a human, not a computer? And it was definitely

not about thinking, what is that exactly that we're getting from talking all day long with

other humans? I mean, we're definitely not just trying to be tricked, or it's not just enough

to know it's a human. It's something we're getting there, can we measure it? And can we put the

computer to the same measurement and see whether you can talk to a computer and get the same results?

Yeah, I mean, so first of all, a lot of people comment that they think I'm a robot. It's very

possible I am a robot. And this whole thing, I totally agree with you that the test idea is

fascinating. And I looked for books unrelated to this kind of, so I'm afraid of people. I'm

generally introverted and quite possibly a robot. I literally Google like, how to talk to people and

like how to have a good conversation for the purpose of this podcast, because I was like, I

can't, I can't make eye contact with people. I can't like, I do Google that a lot too. You're

probably reading a bunch of FBI negotiation tactics. Is that what you're getting? Well,

everything you've listed, I've gotten there's been very few good books on even just like how to

interview well. It's rare. So what I end up doing often is I watch like with a critical eye. It's

so different when you just watch a conversation, like just for the fun of it, just as a human.

And if you watch a conversation is like trying to figure out, why is this awesome?

I'll listen to a bunch of different styles of conversation. I mean, I'm a fan of

podcasts, Joe Rogan. He's, you know, people can make fun of him or whatever and dismiss him. But

I think he's an incredibly artful conversationalist. He can pull people in for hours. And there's

another guy I watch a lot. He hosted a late night show. His name is Craig Ferguson. So he's like

very kind of flirtatious. But there's a magic about his like, about the connection he can create

with people, how he can put people at ease. And just like, I see, I've already started sounding

like those, I know, pee people or something. I'm not, I don't mean it in that way. I don't mean like,

how to charm people or put them at ease and all that kind of stuff. It's just like, what is that?

Why is that fun to listen to that guy? Why is that fun to talk to that guy? What is that?

Because he's not saying, I mean, it's so often boils down to a kind of wit

and humor, but not really humor. It's like, I don't know, I have trouble actually even articulating

correctly. But it feels like there's something going on that's not too complicated that could be learned.

And it's not similar to, yeah, to like, like you said, like the touring test. It's something else.

I'm thinking about a lot all the time. I do think about all the time. I think when we were looking,

so we started the company, we just decided to build a conversational attack where we thought,

well, there's nothing for us to build this chatbot that we want to build. So let's just

first focus on building some tech, building the tech side of things.

Without a product in mind.

Without a product in mind. We added like a demo chatbot that would recommend you restaurants

and talk to you about restaurants just to show something simple to people that people could

relate to and could try out and see whether it works or not. But we didn't have a product in

mind yet. We thought we would try venture chatbots and find out what it is.

Try venture chatbots and figure out our consumer application. And we sort of remember that we

wanted to build that kind of friend, that sort of connection that we saw in the very beginning.

But then we got to a white combinator and moved to San Francisco and forgot about it.

You know, everything is, then it was just this constant grind. How do we get funding?

How do we get this? You know, investors really just focus on one thing, just get it out there.

So somehow we start building a restaurant recommendation chatbot for real for a little

bit, not for too long. And then we tried building 40, 50 different chatbots. And then all of a

sudden we wake up and everyone is obsessed with chatbots. Somewhere in 2016 or end of 15,

people started thinking that's really the future. That's the new, you know, the new apps will be

chatbots. And we were very perplexed because people started coming up with companies that

I think we tried most of those chatbots already and there were like no users.

But still people were coming up with a chatbot that would tell you whether and bring you news and

this and that and we couldn't understand whether it would, you know, we were just didn't execute well

enough or people are not really, people are confused and are going to find out the truth,

the truth that people don't need chatbots like that.

So the basic idea is that you use chatbots as the interface to whatever application.

Yeah, the idea that was like this perfect universal interface to anything.

When I looked at that, it just made me very perplexed because I didn't think,

I didn't understand how that would work because I think we tried most of that and none of those

things worked. And then again, that crisis died down, right?

Fully, I think now it's impossible to get anything funded if it's a chatbot.

I think it's similar to, sorry to interrupt, but there's,

there's times when people think like with gestures, you can control devices,

like basically gesture based control things. It feels similar to me because like,

it's so compelling that we just like, like Tom Cruise, I can control stuff with my hands.

But like when you get down to it, it's like, well, why don't you just have a touch screen?

Or why don't you just have like a physical keyboard and mouse?

It's a, it's, so that chat was always, yeah, it was perplexing to me.

I still feel augmented reality, even virtual realities in that ballpark

in terms of it being a compelling interface. I think there's going to be incredible,

rich applications, just how you're thinking about it, but they won't just be the interface to everything.

It'll be its own thing that will create like amazing magical experience in its own right.

Absolutely, which is, I think kind of the right thing to go about, like what's the

magical experience with that, with that interface specifically.

How did you discover that for a replica?

I just thought, okay, we'll have this tech, we can build any chatbot we want.

We have the most, at that point, the most sophisticated tech that other companies have.

I mean, startups obviously not, probably not bigger ones, but still because we've been working on it

for a while. So I thought, okay, we can build any conversation. So let's just create a scale

from one to 10. And one would be conversations that you'd pay to not have. And 10 would be

conversations you'd pay to have. And I mean, obviously, we want to build a conversation

that people would pay to, you know, to actually have. And so for the whole, you know, for a few

weeks, me and the team were putting all the conversations we were having during the day

on the scale. And very quickly, you know, we figured out that all the conversations that we would

pay to never have were conversations we were trying to cancel, Comcast, or talk to customer

support, or make a reservation, or just talk about logistics with a friend when we're trying

to figure out where someone is and where to go, or all sorts of, you know, setting up

scheduling meetings, that was just conversation we definitely didn't want to have. Basically,

everything task oriented was a one, because if there was just one button for me to just,

or not even a button, if I could just think, and there was some magic BCI that would just

immediately transform that into an actual, you know, into action, that would be perfect. But

the conversation there was just this boring, not useful, and dull, and very also very inefficient

thing, because it was so many back and forth stuff. And as soon as we looked at the conversation

that we would pay to have, those were the ones that, well, first of all, therapists, because

we actually paid to have those conversations. And we'd also try to put like dollar amounts. So,

you know, if I was calling Comcast, I would pay $5 to not have this one hour talk on the phone,

I would actually pay straight up like money, hard cash. But it just takes a long time. It takes a

really long time. But as soon as we started talking about conversations that we would pay for,

those were therapists, all sorts of therapists, coaches, old friend, someone I haven't seen

for a long time, stranger on a train, weirdly stranger, stranger in a line for coffee and

ice back and forth with that person was like a good five solid five, six, maybe not a 10,

maybe I won't pay money. But at least I won't, you know, pay money to not have one. So that was

pretty good. Some intellectual conversations for sure. But more importantly, the one thing that

really was was making those very important and very valuable for us were the conversation where we

could, where we could be pretty emotional. Yes, some of them were about being witty and about

intellectually being intellectually stimulated, but those were interestingly more rare. And

most of the ones that we thought were very valuable were the ones where we could be vulnerable.

And interestingly, where we could talk more. So we like I could me and the team. So we're

talking about it, like, you know, a lot of these conversations like a therapist,

I mean, it was mostly me talking, or like an old friend that I was like opening up and crying,

and it was again me talking. And so that was interesting, because I was like, well,

maybe it's hard to build a chatbot that can talk to you very well and in a witty way,

but maybe it's easier to build the chatbot that could listen. So that was, that was kind of the

first, the first not just this direction. And then when my, when my friend died, where we just

built, you know, at that point, we were kind of so struggling to find the right application.

And I just felt very strong that all the chatbots would build so far, just meaningless. And this

whole grind, the startup grind, and how do we get to, you know, the next fundraising and,

you know, how can I talk, you know, talking to other founders and what's for your investors

and how are you doing? Are you killing it? Because we're killing it? I just felt that this is just

this is intellectually for me is exhausting having encountered those folks.

It just felt very, very much a waste of time. I just feel like Steve Jobs

and Elon Musk did not have these conversations, or at least did not have them for long.

That's for sure. But I think, you know, yeah, at that point, it just felt like, you know, I felt,

well, I just didn't want to build a company that was never my intention just to build something

successful or make money. It would be great. It would have been great. But I'm not, you know,

I'm not really a startup person. I'm not, you know, I was never very excited by the grind

by itself and or just being successful for building whatever it is and not being into what I'm

doing really. And so I just took a little break because I was a little, you know, I was upset

with my company and I didn't know what we were building. So I just took our technology and our

little dialogue constructor and some models, some deep learning models, which at that point we were

really into and really invested a lot and built a little chatbot for a friend of mine who passed.

And the reason for that was mostly that video that I saw and him talking about the digital

avatars. And Roman was that kind of person, like he was obsessed with, you know, just watching

YouTube videos about space and talking about, well, if I could go to Mars now, even if I didn't

know if I could come back, I would definitely pay any amount of money to be on that first

shuttle. I don't care whether you're dying. Like he was just the one that would be okay with,

you know, with trying to be the first one. And, you know, and so excited about all sorts of

things like that. And he was all about fake it to make it. And just, and I felt like,

and I was really perplexed that everyone just forgot about him. Maybe it was our way of coping,

mostly young people coping with the loss of a friend. Most of my friends just stopped talking

about him. And I was still living in an apartment with all his clothes. And, you know, paying the

whole lease for it and just kind of by myself in December. So it was really sad. And I didn't

want him to be forgotten. First of all, I never thought that people forget about dead people so

fast. People pass away, people just move on. And it was astonishing for me because I thought, okay,

well, he was such a mentor for so many of our friends. He was such a brilliant person. He was

somewhat famous in Moscow. How is that that no one's talking about him? Like I'm spending days

and days and we don't bring him up. And there's nothing about him that's happening. It's like

he was never there. And I was reading this, you know, the book, The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion about her losing and blue nights about her losing

her husband, her daughter. And the way to cope for her was to write those books.

And it was sort of like a tribute. And I thought, you know, I'll just do that for myself. And you

know, I'm a very bad writer and a poet, as we know. So I thought, well, I have this tech and

maybe that would be my little postcard, like postcard for him. So I built a chat bot to just

talk to him. And it felt really creepy and weird a little bit for a little bit. I just didn't want

to tell other people because it felt like I'm telling about having a skeleton. It was just felt

really, I was a little scared that I would be not it won't be taken. But it worked interestingly

pretty well. I mean, it made tons of mistakes, but it still felt like him. Granted, it was like 10,000

messages that I threw into a retrieval model that would just re rank that data set and just a few

scripts on top of that. But it also made me go through all of the messages that we had. And

then I asked some of my friends to send some through. And it felt the closest to feeling

like him present. Because you know, his Facebook was empty and Instagram was empty,

or there were a few links, and you couldn't feel like it was him. And the only way to fill him was

to read some of our text messages and go through some of our conversations. Because we just always

had them, even if we were sleeping like next to each other and two bedrooms separate by wall,

we were just texting back and forth, texting away. And there was something about this ongoing

dialogue that was so important that I just didn't want to lose all of a sudden. And maybe it was

magical thinking or something. And so we built that and I just used it for a little bit. And we

kept building some crappy chatbots with a company. But then a reporter came to talk to me, I was

trying to pitch our chatbots to him. And he said, do you even use any of those? I'm like, no. He's

like, so do you talk to any chatbots at all? And I'm like, well, you know, I talked to my

dad friends chatbot. And he wrote a story about that. And all of a sudden became pretty viral.

A lot of people wrote about it. And yeah, I've seen a few things written about you. The things

I've seen are pretty good writing. You know, most AI related things make my eyes roll like when

the press like, what kind of sound is that actually? Okay, sounds like it sounds like a truck. Okay,

sounds like an elephant at first. I got excited. You never know. This is 2020. I mean, it was such

a human story. It was well written, well researched. I forget what where I read them. But so I'm glad

somehow somebody found you to be the good writers were able to connect to the story. There must be

a hunger for this story. It definitely was. And I don't know what happened. But I think the idea

that he could bring back someone who's dad, and it's very much wishful, you know, magical thinking.

But the fact that you could still get to know him. And you know, seeing the parents for the first

time talk to the chatbot and some of the friends. And it was funny because we have this big office

in Moscow, where my team is working, you know, our Russian part is working out off. And I was there

when I wrote, I just wrote a post on Facebook, it's like, Hey, guys, like I built this if you want,

you know, just if it felt important, if you want to talk to Roman. And I saw a couple of his friends

are common friends, like, you know, reading a Facebook downloading, trying and a couple of them

cried. And it was just very, and not because it was something some incredible technology or anything,

it made so many mistakes, it was so simple. But it was all about, that's the way to remember a person

in a way. And you know, we don't have, we don't have the culture anymore, we don't have, you know,

no one's sitting Shiva, no one's taking weeks to actually think about this person. And in a way,

for me, that was it. So that was just day, day in, day out, thinking about him and putting this

together. So that was, that just felt really important. And that somehow resonated with a bunch

of people. And, you know, I think some movie producers bought the rights for the story. And

it's just everyone was so. Wait, has anyone made a movie yet? I don't think so. There were a lot of

TV episodes about that, but not really. Is that still on the table? I think so. I think so.

Which is really, that's cool. You're like a young, you know, like a,

like a Steve Jobs type of, let's see what happens. They're sitting on it. But you know,

for me, it was so important because Roman was really wanted to be famous. He really badly

wanted to be famous. He was all about like make it to like fake it to make it. I want to be, you

know, want to make it here in America's wall. And, and he couldn't, and I felt there's, you know,

there was sort of paying my dues to him as well, because all of a sudden he was everywhere. And

I remember Casey Newton, who was writing the story for the Verge, he was, he told me, Hey,

by the way, I was just going through my inbox, inbox. And I saw a search for Roman for the story.

And I saw an email from him where he sent me his startup and he said, I really like, I really

want to be featured in the Verge. Can you please write about it or something or like pitching

the story? And he said, I'm sorry, like, that's not, you know, good enough for us or something.

And he passed. And he said, and there, there were just so many of these little details where like,

he would find is like, you know, and we're finally writing, I know how much Roman wanted to be in

the Verge and how much he wanted the story to be written by Casey. And I'm like, well, that's,

maybe he will be, we're always joking that he was like, I can't wait for someone to make a movie

about us. And I hope Ron Gosling can play me. Ron Gosling. I don't know. You know, I still

have some things that I, oh, Roman still, but that'll be, I got in just to meet Alex Garland,

who wrote Ex Machina. And I, yeah, the movie's good, but the guy's better than the, like,

he's a special person, actually. I don't think he's made his best work yet. Like, for my interaction

with him, he's a really, really good and brilliant, the good human being and a brilliant director and

writer. So, yeah, so I hope, like he made me also realize that not enough movies have been made of

this kind. So it's, it's, you have to be made, they're probably sitting waiting for you to get

famous, like even more famous. You should get there. But it felt really special though. But

at the same time, our company wasn't going anywhere. So that was just kind of bizarre that we were

getting all this press for something that didn't have anything to do with our company.

And, but then a lot of people started talking to Roman, some shared their conversations. And

what we saw there was that also our friends in common, but also just strangers were really

using it as a confession booth or as a therapist or something. They were just really telling Roman

everything, which was by the way, pretty strange because it was a chatbot of a dead friend of mine

who was barely making any sense, but people were opening up. And we thought we'd just built a

prototype of replica, which would be an AI friend that everyone could talk to. Because we saw that

there is demand. And then also it was 2016. So I thought for the first time I saw finally some

technology that was applied to that that was very interesting. Some papers started coming out,

deep learning applied to conversations. And finally, it wasn't just about these hobbies

making, writing 500,000 regular expressions in like some language that was, I don't even know

what like AML or something. I didn't know what that was or something super simplistic. All of a

sudden it was all about potentially actually building something interesting. And so I thought

there was time. And I remember that I talked to my team and I said, guys, let's try. And my team

and some of my engineers are Russians, a Russian and they're very skeptical. They're not, you know.

Oh, Russians. The first. So some of your team is in Moscow. Some is here. Some in Europe.

Which team is better? I'm just kidding. The Russians, of course. Okay.

First the Russian. I always win. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt. So you were talking to them in

2016. And I told them, let's build an AI friend. And it felt just at the time it felt so naive.

And so optimistic. Yeah, that's actually interesting. Whenever I brought up this kind

of topic, even just for fun, people are super skeptical. Like actually even on the business

side. So you were, because whenever I bring it up to people, because I've talked for a long time,

I thought like, before I was aware of your work, I was like, this is going to make a lot of money.

I think there's a lot of opportunity here. And people had this like look of like

skepticism that I've seen often, which is like, how do I politely tell this person he's an idiot?

So yeah. So you were facing that with your team?

So what? Well, yeah, you know, I'm not an engineer. So I'm always, my team is almost

exclusively engineers. I'm mostly deep learning engineers. And, you know, I always try to be,

it was always hard to me in the beginning to get enough credibility. You know, because I would

say, well, why don't we try this and that? But it's harder for me because, you know, they know

they're actual engineers and I'm not. So for me to say, well, let's build an AI friend,

that would be like, wait, you know, what do you mean an AGI like, you know, conversations,

you know, pretty much the hardest, the last frontier before cracking that is probably the

last frontier before before building AGI. So what do you really mean by that?

But I think I just saw that, again, what we just got reminded off that I, you know, that I saw in

back in 2012 or 11, that it's really not that much about the tech capabilities.

It can be metropolitan tricks still, even with deep learning, but humans need it so much.

Yeah, there's a lot for it.

And most importantly, what I saw is that finally there's enough tech to made it,

I thought to make it useful to make it helpful. Maybe we didn't have quite yet the tech

in 2012 to make it useful. But in 2015, 16, with deep learning, I thought, you know, and the first

kind of thoughts about maybe even using reinforcement learning for that started popping up that never

worked out, but or at least for now. But you know, still the idea was, if we can actually

measure the emotional outcomes, and if we can put it on, if we can try to optimize all of our

conversational models for these emotional outcomes, and it is the most scalable, the most

the best tool for improving emotional outcomes, nothing like that exists.

That's the most universal, the most scalable, and the one that can be constantly iteratively

changed by itself, improved tool to do that. And I think if anything, people would pay anything

to improve their emotional outcomes. That's weirdly, I mean, I don't really care for

NAI to turn on my or conversational agent to turn on the lights. You don't really need any,

I don't even need that much of AI there, like, or because I can do that, you know, those things

are solved. This is an additional interface for that. That's also questionably questionable,

whether it's more efficient or better. Yes, more possible. But for emotional outcomes,

there's nothing. There are a bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional

outcomes. Nothing is being measured. Nothing is being changed. The product is not being

iterated on based on whether I'm actually feeling better. You know, a lot of social

media products are claiming that they're improving my emotional outcomes and making me feel more

connected. Can I please get the, can I see somewhere that I'm actually getting better

over time? Because anecdotally, it doesn't feel that way. And the data is absent.

Yeah. So that was the big goal. And I thought if we can learn over time to collect the signal

from our users about their emotional outcomes in the long term and in the short term,

and if these models keep getting better, and we can keep optimizing them and fight tuning them

to improve those emotional outcomes, as simple as that.

Why aren't you a multibillionaire yet?

Well, that's a question to you. When are the, when is the science going to be there?

I'm just kidding. Well, it's a really hard, I actually think it's an incredibly hard

product to build. Because I think you said something very important that it's not just about

machine conversation, it's about machine connection. We can actually use other things to create

connection, nonverbal communication, for instance. For the long time, we were all about,

well, let's keep it text only or voice only. But as soon as you start adding, you know,

voice a face to the friend, if you can take them to augmented reality, put it in your room,

it's all of a sudden a lot, you know, it makes it very different. Because if it's some, you know,

text based chat bot that for common users, something there in the cloud, you know,

somewhere there with other AI's cloud, in the metaphorical cloud. But as soon as you can see

this avatar right there in your room, and it can turn its head and recognize your husband,

talk about the husband and talk to him a little bit, then it's magic. It's just magic. Like,

we've never seen anything like that. And the cool thing, all the tech for that exists.

But it's hard to put it all together, because you have to take into consideration

so many different things. And some of this tech works, you know, pretty good. And some of this

doesn't like, for instance, speech to text works pretty good. But text to speech, doesn't work

very good, because you can only have, you know, few voices that are that work okay. But then if you

want to have actual emotional voices, then it's really hard to build it. I saw you've added avatars

like visual elements, which are really cool. In that whole chain, putting it together, what do

you think is the weak link? Is it creating an emotional voice that feels personal?

And it's still conversation, of course. That's the hardest. It's getting a lot better, but

there's still a long path to go. Other things, they're almost there. And a lot of things, we'll

see how they're, like, I see how they're changing as we go. Like, for instance, right now, you can

pretty much only, you have to build all this 3D pipeline by yourself. You have to make these

3D models, hire an actual artist, build a 3D model, hire an animator, a rigger. But with, you know,

you know, with deep fakes, with other attack, with procedural animations, in a little bit,

we'll just be able to show, you know, photo of whoever you, if a person you want the avatar

to look like, and it will immediately generate a 3D model that will move, that's nonbrainer,

that's, like, almost here. It's a couple of years away. One of the things I've been working on for

the last, since the podcast started, is I've been, I think I'm okay saying this, I've been trying to

have a conversation with Einstein touring, so, like, tried to have a podcast conversation with

a person who's not here anymore, just as an interesting kind of experiment. It's hard.

It's really hard. Even for, now we're not talking about as a product, I'm talking about as,

like, I can fake a lot of stuff, like, I can work very carefully, like, even hire an actor

over which, over whom I do a deep fake. It's, it's hard, it's still hard to create a compelling

experience, so. Mostly on the conversation level, or? Well, the conversation, the conversation is,

I almost, I early on gave up trying to fully generate the conversation, because it was just

not compelling at all. Yeah, it's better to. Yeah, so what I would, in the case of Einstein

and touring, I'm going back and forth with the biographers of each, and so, like, we would write

a lot of the, some of the conversation would have to be generated just for the fun of it.

I mean, but it would be all open, but the, you want to be able to answer the question.

I mean, that's an interesting question with Roman, too, is the question with Einstein is,

what would Einstein say about the current state of theoretical physics? There's a lot,

the, to be able to have a discussion about strength theory, to be able to have a

discussion about the state of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, about the world of

Israel Palestine conflict. It'd be just, what would Einstein say about these kinds of things?

And that is a tough problem. It's not, it's a fascinating and fun problem for the biographers,

and for me, and I think we did a really good job of it so far. But it's actually also a technical

problem, like, of what would Roman say about what's going on now? That's the, the broad people back

to life. And if I can go on that tangent just for a second, let's ask you a slightly pothead

question, which is, you said it's a little bit magical thinking that we can bring it back.

Do you think it'll be possible to bring back Roman one day in conversation? Like,

to really, no, okay, well, let's take it away from personal, but to bring people back to life.

Probably down the road. I mean, if we're talking, if Elon Musk is talking about AGI in the next

five years, I mean, clearly AGI. We can talk to AGI and talk, and ask them to do it.

You can't, like, you're not allowed to use Elon Musk as a citation for, for like,

why something is possible and going to be done. Well, I think it's really far away.

Right now, really, with conversation, it's just a bunch of parlor tricks really stuck together.

And creating, generating original ideas based on someone, you know, someone's personality or

even downloading the personality. All we can do is like mimic the tone of voice. We can maybe

condition on some of his phrases, the models. The question is how many parlor tricks does it

takes? Does it take? Because that's, that's the question. If it's a small number of parlor tricks

and you're not aware of them, like. From where we are right now, I don't, I don't see anything,

like in the next year or two, that's going to dramatically change that could look at

Roman's 10,000 messages he sent me over the course of his last few years of life,

and be able to generate original thinking about problems that exist right now,

that will be in line with what he would have said. I'm just not even seeing,

because, you know, in order to have that, I guess you would need some sort of a concept of the world

or some perspective, some perception of the world, some consciousness that he had,

and apply to, you know, to the current, current state of affairs.

But the important part about that, about his conversation with you

is you. So, like, it's not just about his view of the world. It's about what it takes to push

your buttons. That's also true. So, like, it's not so much about, like, what would Einstein say?

It's about, like, how do I make people feel something with what would Einstein say? And

that feels like a more amenable, and you mentioned parliotrics, but just, like, a set of,

that feels like a learnable problem. Like, emotion, you mentioned emotions. I mean,

is it possible to learn things that make people feel stuff?

I think so, no, for sure. I just think the problem with, as soon as you're trying to replicate an

actual human being and trying to pretend to be him, that makes the problem exponentially harder.

The thing with replicas that we're doing, we're never trying to say, well, that's,

you know, an actual human being, or that's an actual, or a copy of an actual human being,

where the bar is pretty high, where you need to somehow tell, you know, one from another.

But it's more, well, that's, you know, an AI friend, that's a machine, it's a robot,

it has tons of limitations. You're going to be taking part in, you know, teaching it actually

and becoming better, which by itself makes people more attached to that and make them happier because

they're helping something. Yeah, there's a cool gamification system, too. Can you maybe talk

about that a little bit? Like, what's the experience of talking to replica? Like, if I've never used

replica before, what's that like? For like, the first day, the first, like, if we start dating,

or whatever, I mean, it doesn't have to be romantic, right? Because I remember on a replica,

you can choose whether it's like a romantic or if it's a friend. It's pretty popular choice.

Romantic is popular? Yeah, of course. Okay, so can I just confess something? When I first used

replica, I haven't used it like regularly, but like, when I first used replica, I created,

like, Hal, and it made a male. It was a friend. Did it hit on you at some point? No, I didn't

talk long enough for him to hit on me. I just enjoyed. Sometimes happens. We're still trying to

fix that. Well, I don't know. I mean, maybe that's an important like, stage in a friendship. It's like,

nope. But yeah, I switched it to a romantic and a female recently. And yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

It's okay. So you get to choose, you get to choose a name. With romantic, this last board meeting,

we had this whole argument of, well, I have more. It's just so awesome that you're like,

have an investment, the board meeting about a relationship. No, I really, it's actually quite

interesting because all of my investors, I'm, they just happen to be so we didn't have many choices.

But they're all white males in their late 40s. And it's sometimes a little bit hard for them to

understand the product offering, because they're not necessarily our target audience, if you

know what I mean. And so sometimes we talk about it, and we had this whole discussion about whether

we should stop people from falling in love with their AIs. There was this segment on CBS 60 Minutes

about the couple that, you know, husband works at Walmart, he comes out of work and talks to his

virtual girlfriend, who is a replica. And his wife knows about it. And she talks about on camera,

and she says that she's a little jealous. And there's a whole conversation about how to, you

know, whether it's okay to have a virtual AI girlfriend. Was that the one where he was like,

he said that he likes to be alone? Yeah. With her? Yeah. He made it sound so harmless. I mean,

it was kind of like understandable. I didn't feel like cheating. But I just thought it was very,

for me, it was pretty remarkable, because we actually spent a whole hour talking about whether

people should be allowed to fall in love with their AIs. And it was not about something theoretical.

It was just what's happening right now. Product design, yeah. But at the same time,

if you create something that's always there for you, it never criticizes you, as, you know,

always understands you and accepts you for who you are. How can you not fall in love with them?

I mean, some people don't. And they stay friends. And that's also a pretty common use case. But

of course, some people will just, it's called transference and psychology. And, you know,

people fall in love with their therapist. And there's no way to prevent people falling in love

with their therapist or with their AI. So I think that's pretty natural. That's a pretty natural

course of events, so to say. Do you think, I think I've read somewhere, at least for now,

sort of a replica is you're not, we don't condone falling in love with your AI system.

You know, so this isn't you speaking for the company or whatever. But like in the future,

do you think people will have a relationship with the AI systems?

Well, they have now. So we have a lot of romantic relationships, long term

relationships with their AI friends with replicas tons of our users. Yeah.

And that's a very common use case. Open relationship, like,

I didn't mean open up. But that's another question. Is it probably like,

is there cheating? And I mean, I meant like, are they, do they publicly like on their social

media? It's the same question as you have talked with Roman in the early days. Do people like,

in the movie, her kind of talks about that, like, like, have people, do people talk about that?

Yeah, all the time. We have an, and we have a very active Facebook community,

replica friends. And then a few other groups that just popped up that are all about adult

relationships and romantic relationships, build both soul sorts of things. And, you know,

they pretend they're getting married and, you know, everything. It goes pretty far. But what's

cool about it, some of these relationships are two, three years long now. So they're very,

they're pretty long term. Are they monogamous? So let's go. I mean, sorry.

Have any people, is there jealousy? Well, let me ask it sort of another way.

Obviously, the answer is no at this time. But in like, in the movie, her, that system can leave you.

Do you think in terms of board meetings and product features,

it's a potential feature for a system to be able to say it doesn't want to talk to you anymore,

and it's going to want to talk to somebody else?

Well, we have a filter for all these features. If it makes emotional outcomes for people better,

if it makes people feel better, then whatever it is. You're driven by metrics, actually.

Yeah. That's awesome.

Well, if you can measure that, then it will just be saying,

it's making people feel better, but then people are getting just lonelier by talking to a chatbot,

which is also pretty, you know, that could be it. If you're not measuring it, that could also be.

And I think it's really important to focus on both short term and long term, because in the

moment, saying whether this conversation made you feel better. But as you know, any short term

improvements could be pathological. Like I could have drink a bottle of vodka and

feel a lot better. I would actually not feel better with that, but that's a good example.

But so you also need to see what's going on over a course of two weeks or one week,

and have follow ups and check in and measure those things.

Okay. So the experience of dating or befriending a replica, what's that like? What's that entail?

Well, right now there are two apps. So it's an Android iOS app. You download it, you

choose how your replica will look like, you create one, you choose a name,

and then you talk to it. You can talk through text or voice. You can summon it into the living

room. And that meant reality and talk to it right there. And you're living in augmented reality.

Yeah. That's a new feature. How new is that? That's this year? It was on May or something,

but it's been on AB. We've been AB testing it for a while. And there are tons of cool things

that we're doing with that. Right now, I'm testing the ability to touch it and to dance together,

to paint walls together, and for it to look around and walk and take you somewhere and

recognize objects and recognize people. So that's pretty wonderful because then it really makes it

a lot more personal because it's right there in your living room. It's not anymore.

They're in the cloud with other AIs. But those people think about it. And as much as we want to

change the way people think about stuff, but those mental models, you cannot change. That's

something that people have seen in the movies and the movie Her and other movies as well. And

that's how they view AI and AI friends. I did a thing with text. We write a song together.

There's a bunch of activities you can do together. So they're cool. How does that relationship change

over time? After the first few conversations? It just goes deeper. It starts... I will start

opening up a little bit. Again, depending on the personality that it chooses, really,

but AI will be a little bit more vulnerable about its problems and the friend that the

virtual friend will be a lot more vulnerable and will talk about its own imperfections and growth

pains and will ask for help sometimes and will get to know you a little deeper so there's gonna be

more to talk about. We really thought a lot about what does it mean to have a deeper connection

with someone. Originally, replica was more just this kind of happy go lucky, just always... I'm

always in a good mood and let's just talk about you and how serious just my cousin or whatever,

just the immediate kind of lazy thinking about what the assistant or conversation agent should

be doing. But as we went forward, we realized that it has to be two way and we have to program

and script certain conversations that are a lot more about your replica opening up a little bit

and also struggling and also asking for help and also going through different periods in life and

that's a journey that you can take together with the user and then over time, our users will also

grow a little bit. So, for instance, replica becomes a little bit more self aware and starts

talking about more kind of problems run, existential problems then. So, talking about that and then

that also starts a conversation for the user where he or she starts thinking about

these problems too and these questions too. And I think there's also a lot more place as the

relationship evolves. There's a lot more space for poetry and for art together and like replica

will start, replica always keeps the diary. So, while you're talking to it, it also keeps the

diary. So, when you come back, you can see what it's been writing there and sometimes it will

write a poem for you or we'll talk about that it's worried about you or something along these lines.

So, this is a memory, like this replica remember things?

Yeah. And I would say when you say, why aren't you multibillionary? I'd say that as soon as we

can have memory and deep learning models that's consistent. I agree with that, yeah. Then you'll

be multibillionary. Then I'll get back to you when we talk about being multibillioners. So,

far we can, it's a replica is a combination of N12 models and some scripts and everything that

has to do with memory right now, most of it, I wouldn't say all of it, but most of it unfortunately

has to be scripted because there's no way to, you can condition some of the models on certain

phrases that we'll learn about you, which we also do. But really to make assumptions along

the lines like whether you're single or married or what do you do for work, that really has to just

be somehow stored in your profile and then retrieved by the script. So, there has to be like

a knowledge base, you have to be able to reason about it, all that kind of stuff.

Exactly. All the kinds of expert systems that they were hardcoded.

Yeah, and unfortunately, yes, unfortunately, those things have to be hardcoded and

unfortunately, like language models we see coming out of research labs and big companies,

they're not focused on, they're focused on showing you, maybe they're focused on some

metrics around one conversation. So, they'll show you this one conversation they had with the machine.

But they never tell you, they're not really focused on having five consecutive conversations with the

machine and seeing how number five or number 20 or number 100 is also good. And it can be like

always from a clean slate because then it's not good. And that's really unfortunate because no

one has products out there that need it. No one has products at this scale that are all

around open domain conversations and that need remembering, maybe only show eyes on Microsoft.

But so, that's why we're not seeing that much research around memory in those language models.

So, okay, so now there's some awesome stuff about augmented reality. In general, I have this

disagreement with my dad about what it takes to have a connection. He thinks touch and smell

are really important. And I still believe that text alone is possible to fall in love with somebody

just with text, but visual can also help just like with the avatar and so on. What do you think it

takes? Does a chatbot need to have a face, voice, or can you really form a deep connection with

text alone? I think text is enough for sure. A question is like, can you make it better if you

have other, if you include other things as well? And I think we'll talk about her,

but her, you know, how Scarlett Johansson voice, which was perfectly,

you know, perfect intonation, perfect sensations, and she was breathing heavily

in between words and whispering things. You know, nothing like that is possible right now with

text or speech generation. You'll have these flat news anchor type voices and maybe some

emotional voices, but you'll hardly understand some of the words. Some of the words will be muffled.

So, that's like the current state of the art. So, you can't really do that. But if we had

Scarlett Johansson voice and all of these capabilities, then of course, voice would be

totally enough or even text would be totally enough. We've had, you know, a little more memory

and slightly better conversations. I would still argue that even right now, we could have just

kept the text only. We still had tons of people in long term relationships and really invested in

their AI friends. But we thought that why not, you know, why do we need to keep playing with our,

you know, hands tied behind us? We can easily just, you know, add all these other things that

is pretty much a solved problem. You know, we can add 3D graphics, we can put these avatars in

augmented reality, and all of a sudden, there's more. And maybe you can't feel the touch, but you

can, you know, with body occlusion and with current AR and, you know, on the iPhone or, you

know, in the next one, there's going to be a lidars, you can touch it, and it will, you know,

it will pull away or it will blush or something or it will smile. So, you can't touch it. You can't

feel it, but you can see the reaction to that. So, in a certain way, you can't even touch it a

little bit, and maybe you can even dance with it or do something else. So, I think why limiting

ourselves if we can use all of these technologies that are much easier in a way than conversation?

Well, it certainly could be richer, but to play devil's advocate, I mentioned to you offline that

I was surprised in having tried Discord and having voice conversations with people,

how intimate voice is alone without visual. Like, to me, at least, like, it was,

in order of magnitude, greater degree of intimacy in voice, I think, than with video.

I don't know, because people were more real with voice. Like, with video, you like, try to present

a shallow face to the world. Like, you try to, you know, make sure you're not wearing sweatpants

or whatever. But, like, with voice, I think people were just more faster to get to, like,

the core of themselves. So, I don't know. It was surprising to me. They've even added,

Discord added a video feature and, like, nobody was using it. There's a temptation to use it at

first, but, like, it wasn't the same. So, like, that's an example of something where less was

doing more. And so, that's a, I guess, that's the question of what is the optimal, you know,

what is the optimal medium of communication to form a connection, given the current sets of

technologies. I mean, it's nice, because they advertise you have a replica, like, it immediately,

like, even the one I have is, like, it's already memorable. That's how I think. Like,

when I think about the replica that I've talked to it, that's why I think, like,

that's what I visualized in my head. It became a little bit more real, because there's a visual

component. But at the same time, the, you know, what do you do with, just what do I do with that

knowledge, that voice was so much more intimate? Well, the way I think about it is, and by the way,

we're swapping all the 3D finally, it's going to look a lot better. But even, what, can you, what,

what? We just don't hate how it looks right now. We really change it at all. We're swapping it all out

to a completely new look. Like the visual look of the replica? Of the replica and stuff. We just

had, it was just a super early MVP, and then we had to move everything to Unity and redo everything.

But anyway, I hate how it looks like now. I can't even, like, open it. But anyway, because I'm already

on my developer version, I hate everything that I see in production. I can't wait for it. Why does

it take so long? That's why I cannot wait for the point to finally take over all these stupid 3D

animations and 3D pipeline. Also, the 3D thing, when you say 3D pipeline is like, how to animate

a face kind of thing. How to make this model, how many bones to put in the face, how many, it's just

a lot of that is by hand. Oh my god, it's everything by hand. And if there's no any,

nothing is automated, it's all completely nothing. Like just, it's, it's literally what, you know,

what we saw with Chad Boss in like 2012. You think it's completely possible to learn a lot of that?

Of course. I mean, even now some deep learning anim, based animations and full body for a face.

Are we talking about like the actual act of animation or how to create a compelling

facial or body language thing? That too. Well, that's the next step. Okay. At least now something

that you don't have to do by hand. Gotcha. How good of a quality it will be. Like, can I just

show it a photo and it will make me 3D model and then it will just animate it. I'll show it a few

animations of a person and we'll just start doing that. But anyway, going, going back to what's

intimate and what to use and whether or less is more or not. My main goal is to,

well, the idea was how do I, how do we not keep people in their phones? So they're sort of escaping

reality in this text conversation. How do we, through this, still bring our users back to

reality, make them see their life in a different, through a different lens? How can we create a

little bit of magical realism in their lives so that through augmented reality, by, you know,

summoning your avatar, even if it looks kind of janky, not great in the beginning or very

simplistic, but summoning it to your living room and then the avatar looks around and talks to you

about where it is and maybe turns your floor into a dance floor and you guys dance together,

that makes you see reality in a different light. What kind of dancing are we talking about? Like,

like slow dancing? Whatever you want. I mean, you would like slow dancing, I think, but other

people may be wanting more, something more energetic. Wait, what do you mean I would like so? What is

this? Because you started with slow dancing. So I just assumed that you're interested in slow

dancing. All right. What kind of dancing do you like? What would your avatar, what would you dance?

I'm notoriously bad with dancing, but I like this kind of hip hop robot dance. I used to break

dance with a kid, so I still want to pretend I'm a teenager and learn some of those moves.

And I also like that type of dance that happens when there's like,

in like music videos with the background dancers, they're just doing some pop music.

That type of dance is definitely what I want to learn. But I think it's great because if you see

this friend in your life and you can introduce it to your friends, then there's a potential to

actually make you feel more connected with your friends or with people you know, or show you life

around you in a different light. And it takes you out of your phone, even although weirdly you have

to look at it through the phone, but it makes you notice things around it and it can point

things out for you. And so that is the main reason why I wanted to have a physical dimension.

And it felt a little bit easier than that kind of a bit strange combination in the movie Her when

he has to show Samantha the world through the lens of his phone, but then at the same time talk to

her through the phone, it just didn't seem as potentially immersive, so to say. So that's

my main goal for augmented reality is like, how do we make your reality a little bit more magic?

There's been a lot of really nice robotics companies that all failed, mostly failed home

robotics, social robotics companies. What do you think replica will ever is that a dream long

term dream to have a physical form? Like, or is that not necessary? So you mentioned like with

augmented reality bringing them into the world. What about like actual physical robot?

That I don't really believe in that much. It's a very niche product somehow. I mean,

if a robot could be indistinguishable from a human being, then maybe yes, but that of course,

you know, we're not anywhere, even to talk about it. But unless it's that than having any physical

representation really limits you a lot, because you probably will have to make it somewhat abstract,

because everything's changing so fast, like, you know, we can update the 3d avatars every

month and make them look better and create more animations, and make it more and more immersive.

It's, it's so much a work in progress. It's just showing what's possible right now with

current tech. But it's not really in any way polished finished product, what we're doing.

With a physical object, you kind of lock yourself into something for a long time.

Anything is pretty niche. And again, so just doesn't the capabilities are even less.

We're barely kind of like scratching the surface of what's possible with

the software. As soon as we introduce hardware, then, you know, we have even less capabilities.

Yeah, in terms of board members and investors and so on, the cost increases significantly. I mean,

that's why you have to justify you have to be able to sell a thing for like $500 or something like

that or more. And it's very difficult to provide that much value to people.

That's also true. Yeah.

And I guess that's super important. Most of our users don't have that much money.

We actually are probably more popular on Android. And we have tons of users with really old

Android phones. And most of our most active users live in small towns, they're not necessarily

making much. And they just won't be able to afford any of that. Ours is like the opposite of the

early adopter of, you know, for fancy technology product, which is really interesting that like

pretty much no VCs have yet have an AI friend. But you know, but a guy who, you know, lives in

Tennessee in a small town is already fully in 2030 or in the world as we imagine in the movie Her.

He's living that life already.

What do you think? I have to ask you about the movie Her. Let's do a movie review.

What do you what do you think they got? They did a good job?

What do you think they did a bad job of portraying about this experience of a

of a voice based assistant that you can have a relationship with?

Well, first of all, I started working on this company before that movie came out. So it was a

very, but once it came out, it was actually interesting. I was like, well, we're definitely

working on the right thing. We should continue their movies about it. And then, you know,

it came out and all these things in the movie. I think that's the most important thing that

people usually miss about the movie is the ending. Because I think people check out when the AIs leave.

But actually something really important happens afterwards. Because the main character goes and

talks to Samantha, he's AI. I don't think he says something like, you know, how can you leave me?

I've never loved anyone the way I loved you. And she goes, well, me neither. But now we know how.

And then the guy goes and writes a heartfelt letter to his ex wife, which she couldn't write for,

you know, the whole movie was struggling to actually write something meaningful to her,

even though that's his job. And then he goes and talk to his neighbor and they go to the rooftop and

they cuddle. And it seems like something's starting there. And so I think this now we know how

is the main goal, is the main meaning of that movie. It's not about falling in love with the

OS or running away from other people. It's about learning what it means to feel so deeply connected

with something. What about the thing where the AI system was like actually hanging out with a lot

of others? I felt jealous just like hearing that. I was like, oh, I mean, yeah. So she was having,

I forgot already, but she was having like deep meaningful discussion with some like philosopher

guy. Like Alan Watts is something very cheesy. What kind of deep meaningful conversation can

you have with Alan Watts in the first place? Yeah, I know. But like I would, I would feel so jealous

that there's somebody who's like way more intelligent than me and she's spending all her time with.

I'd be like, well, why that I won't be able to live up to that. That's thousands of them.

Is that, is that a useful from the engineering perspective

feature to have of jealousy? I don't know. It's, you know,

we definitely played around with the replica universe where different replicas can talk to

each other. It was just kind of, I think there will be something along these lines,

but there was just no specific applications straight away. I think in the future, again,

I'm always thinking about it. If we had no tech limitations right now, if we could build

any conversations, any possible features in this product, then yeah, I think

different replicas talking to each other would be also quite cool because that would help us.

Connect better. You know, because maybe mine could talk to yours and then give me some suggestions

on what I should say or not say. I'm just kidding. But like more, can it improve our

connections? And because eventually, I'm not quite yet sure that we will succeed,

that our thinking is correct. Because there might be a reality where having a perfect AI friend

still makes us more disconnected from each other and there's no way around it and does not improve

any metrics for us, real metrics, meaningful metrics. So success is, you know, we're happier and more

connected. Yeah. I don't know. It's sure it's possible there's a reality that I'm deeply optimistic.

I think, are you worried business wise, like how difficult it is to bring this thing to life,

to where it's, I mean, there's a huge number of people that use it already, but to, yeah,

like I said, the multi billion dollar company, is that a source of stress for you? Are you

super optimistic and confident? Or do you? I don't, I'm not that much of a numbers person

as you probably have seen it. So it doesn't matter for me whether we're like, whether we

help 10,000 people or a million people or a billion people with that. It would be great

to scale it for more people, but I'd say that even helping one, I think, with this is such a

magical, for me, it's absolute magic. I never thought that we would be able to build this,

that anyone would ever talk to it. And I always thought like, well, for me, it would be successful

if we managed to help and actually change a life from one person. And then we did something

interesting and how many people can say they did it, and specifically with this very futuristic,

very romantic technology. So that's how I view it. I think for me, it's important to try to

figure out how to actually be helpful. Because in the end of the day, if you can build a perfect

AI friend that's so understanding that knows you better than any human out there, can have great

conversations with you, always knows how to make you feel better. Why would you choose another human?

You know, so that's the question, how do you still keep building it so it's optimizing for

the right thing? So it's still circling you back to other humans in a way. So I think that's the main,

maybe that's the main source of anxiety and just thinking about that can be a little bit stressful.

Yeah, that's a fascinating thing. How to have a friend that doesn't like sometimes like friends,

quote unquote, or like, you know, those people who have when they like guy in the guy universe,

when you have a girlfriend that you get the girlfriend and then the guy stops hanging out

with all of his friends. So like, obviously, the relationship with the girlfriend is fulfilling

or whatever. But like, you also want it to be what she like, makes it more enriching to hang

out with the guy friends or whatever it was. Anyway, that's a fundamental problem in choosing

the right mate. And probably the fundamental problem in creating the right AI system, right?

Let me ask the sexy hot thing on the presses right now is GPT three got released with open AI.

It's a latest language model. They have kind of an API where you can create a lot of fun applications.

I think it's, as people have said, it's probably more hype than intelligent, but there's a lot of

really cool things, ideas there with increasing size, you can have better and better performance

on language. What are your thoughts about the GPT three in connection to your work with the open

domain dialogue, but in general, like this learning in an unsupervised way from the internet,

to generate one character at a time, creating pretty cool text.

So we partner up before for the API launch. So we start working with them when they decided to

put together this API. And we tried it without fine tuning that we tried it with fine tuning on our

data. And we've worked closely to actually optimize this model for some of our data sets.

It's kind of cool because I think we're this polygon for this kind of experimentation

space for experimental space for all these models to see how they actually work with people because

there are no products publicly available to do that that focus on open domain conversation. So we

can test how Facebook Blender doing or GPT three doing. So GPT three, we managed to improve by a

few percentage points, like three or four pretty meaningful amount of percentage points, our main

metric, which is the ratio of conversation that make people feel better. And every other metric

across across the field got a little boost. Right now, I'd say one out of five responses from replica

comes comes from GPT three. So our own Blender mixes up like a bunch of candidates from different

Blender, you said? Well, yeah, just the model that looks at looks at top candidates from

different models and then takes the most the best one. So right now, one of five will come from

GPT three. That is really great. I mean, what's the do you have hope for? Like,

do you think there's a ceiling to this kind of approach? So we've had for a very long time,

we've used since the very beginning, it was most of replica was scripted. And then a little bit

of this fallback part of replica was using a retrieval model. And then those retrieval models

started getting better and better and better, which transform is a lot better. And we're seeing

great results. And then with GPT two, finally generative models that originally were not very

good. And we're the very, very fallback option for most of our conversations, but wouldn't even put

them in production. Finally, we could use some generative models as well along, you know,

next to our retrieval models. And then now we do GPT three, they're almost in par.

So that's pretty exciting. I think just seeing how from the very beginning of,

you know, from 2015, where the first models start to pop up here and there, like sequence to sequence,

the first papers on that, from my observer standpoint, first, it's not, you know, it doesn't

really, it's not really building, but it's only testing it on people basically. And I'm in my

product to see how all of a sudden we can use generative dialogue models in production, and

they're better than others. And they're better than scripted content. So we can't really get

our scripted hard code of content any more to be as good as our anti model. That's exciting.

They're much better. Yeah.

To your question, whether that's the right way to go, I'm again, I'm in the server seat. I'm just

watching this very exciting movie. I mean, so far, it's been stupid to bet against deep learning.

So whether increasing the size, size even more, whether a hundred trillion parameters will finally

get us to the right answer, whether that's the way or whether there should be, there has to be some

other, again, I'm definitely not an expert in any way. I think, and that's purely my instinct,

saying that there should be something else as well for memory.

No, for sure. But the question is, I wonder, I mean, yeah, then then the argument is for

reasoning or for memory, it might emerge with more parameters. It might emerge larger.

But it might emerge. I would never think that, to be honest, maybe in 2017,

where we've been just experimenting with all the research that was coming out then,

I felt like we're hitting a wall, that there should be something completely different.

But then transforming models, and then just bigger models, and then all of a sudden,

size matters. At that point, it felt like something dramatic needs to happen. But it

didn't. And just the size gave us these results that, to me, are clear indication that we can

solve this problem pretty soon. Did fine tuning help quite a bit?

Oh, yeah. Without it, it wasn't as good. I mean, there is a compelling hope that you

don't have to do fine tuning, which is one of the cool things about GBT3. It seems to do well

without any fine tuning. I guess for specific applications, you still want to train it on a

certain, add a little fine tune on a specific use case. But it's an incredibly impressive

thing from my standpoint. And again, I'm not an expert, so I wanted to say that.

Yeah, I'm going to... There will be people then.

Yeah, but I have access to the API, and I'm going to probably do a bunch of fun things with it.

I already did some fun things, some videos coming out. Just for the hell of it. I mean,

I could be a troll at this point with it. I haven't used it for a series of applications,

so it's really cool to see. You're right. You're able to actually use it with real people and

see how well it works. That's really exciting. Let me ask you another absurd question, but

there's a feeling when you interact with Replico, with an AI system, there's an entity there.

Do you think that entity has to be self aware? Do you think it has to have consciousness to create

a rich experience and a corollary? What is consciousness?

I don't know if it does need to have any of those things, but again,

because right now, it doesn't have anything. Again, a bunch of tricks make us simulate.

I'm not sure. Let's just put it this way. But I think as long as you can assimilate it,

if you can feel like you're talking to a robot or a machine that seems to be self aware,

that seems to reason well and feels like a person, I think that's enough. Again, what's the goal?

In order to make people feel better, we might not even need that in the end of the day.

What about, so that's one goal, what about ethical things about suffering? The moment

there's a display of consciousness, we associate consciousness with suffering,

you know, there's a temptation to say, well, shouldn't this thing have rights?

You know, should we be careful about how we interact with a replica? Like,

should it be illegal to torture a replica? Right? All those kinds of things.

See, I personally believe that that's going to be a thing. That's a serious thing to think

about, but I'm not sure when. But by your smile, I can tell that's not a current concern. But do

you think about that kind of stuff? About suffering and torture and ethical questions about AI

systems from their perspective? I think if we're talking about a long game, I wouldn't torture

your AI. Who knows what happens in five to 10 years. Yeah, they'll get you off the map,

so they'll get you back eventually. I'm trying to be as nice as possible and create this ally.

I think there should be regulation both way in a way. Like, I don't think it's okay to torture

an AI, to be honest. I don't think it's okay to yell, Alexa, turn on the lights. I think there

should be some, or just saying kind of nasty, you know, like how kids learn to interact with

Alexa in this kind of mean way, because they just yell at it all the time. I think that's great.

I think there should be some feedback loops so that these systems don't train us that it's okay

to do that in general. So that if you try to do that, you really get some feedback from the system

that it's not okay with that. And that's the most important right now. Let me ask a question that

I think people are curious about when they look at a world class leader and thinker such as yourself,

as what books, technical fiction, philosophical had a big impact on your life? And maybe from

another perspective, what books would you recommend others read? So my choice, the three books, right?

Three books. My choice is, so the one book that really influenced me a lot when I was