The following is a conversation with Eugenia Kuida, co-founder of Replica, which is an app that allows you to make friends with an artificial intelligence system, a chatbot, that learns to connect with you on an emotional, you 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 Mazarenki, 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.
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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 to 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 an apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman.
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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.
Let me ask you a ridiculously romanticized Russian question.
Do you think human beings are alone, like fundamentally, on a philosophical level?
Like 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 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.
Do 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 if you see loneliness as a condition, how much of it is there, do you think?
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, size-wise?
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, 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 the impact on your physiological health.
So 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.
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 appoint,
because 4 out of 10 people in the UK feel lonely.
A minister of loneliness.
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, 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, well, 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 Z seems to be, Gen R should be, seems to be much lonelier than millennials
in terms of how 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 that might be, you know,
this hyperconnected world might actually make people feel lonelier.
I don't know exactly what the measurements are around that, but I would say, you know,
in my personal experience, I think it does make you feel a lot 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.
Like, in order to not feel lonely, you actually need to have a better relationship
and feel more connected to yourself than this feeling actually starts to go away a little bit.
And then you open up yourself to actually meeting other people in a very special way,
not just, you know, add 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 the fact. That's what we're doing.
And we see it and we measure that and we see how people start to feel less lonely
talking to their virtual AI friend.
So basically a chatbot at the basic level, but could be more.
Like, do you have, I'm not even speaking sort of 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, AIs that are, like, optimized for...
Let me first start, like, right now the way people perceive AI, which is recommender systems
for Facebook and Twitter, social media, they see AIs 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, I totally believe in that. That's why I'm also working on that.
I think we need to also make sure that what we're trying to optimize for,
we're actually measuring and it is 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 or making you feel more connected,
they're not really measuring that so they don't really know whether their users
are actually feeling less lonely in the long run or feeling more connected in the long run.
So I think it's really important to put your...
To measure it.
Yeah, to measure it.
What's a good measurement of loneliness?
So that's something that I'm really interested in.
How do you measure that people are feeling better or that they're feeling less lonely?
With loneliness, there's a scale, there's a UCLA 20 and UCLA 3 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 to trick you to answer honestly or something like that?
Yeah, I'm not familiar with the question.
It is just asking you a few questions, like how often did you feel lonely
or how often did you feel connected to other people in this last few couple weeks?
It's similar to the self-report questionnaires for depression and anxiety,
like BHQ9 and GET7. 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 and you get them through these questionnaires,
you can see positive dynamics.
And so you basically 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.
You should probably do that.
You should totally start measuring.
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 it talked about deep connection with other 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 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?
The answer is no.
It's all the same.
Is it just a gradual thing?
Or is there something fundamental about us humans that seek a really deep connection?
Well, then another human being, and what is that?
What is love, Eugenia?
I'm just going to enjoy asking you these questions.
I like that.
Seeing you struggle.
Thanks.
And specifically, the way it relates to our work and 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?
That you exist? Like somebody acknowledging that?
Somebody seeing you for who you actually are, and that's extremely rare.
I think that combined with unconditional positive regard, belief and trust that you internally are
always inclined for positive growth and believing in you in this way,
letting you be a separate person at the same time, and this deep empathetic understanding.
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 in accepting you for who you are.
Now, and you mentioned therapeutic, that sounds like a very healthy view of love,
is there also like, if we look at heartbreak, and most love songs are probably about heartbreak, right?
Is that like the mystery, the tension, the danger, the fear of loss, all of that,
what people might see in the negative light as like games or whatever,
just the dance of human interaction, fear of loss,
and fear of like, you said like once you feel it once, you long for it again,
but you also, once you feel it once, you might, for many people, they've lost it,
so they fear losing it, they feel loss, so is that part of it?
You're speaking beautifully about the positive things,
but is it important to be able to be afraid of losing it from an engineering perspective?
It's a huge part of it, and unfortunately, we all 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. My source was pretty straightforward there.
I did have a friend 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 these AI friends,
I think about myself when I was 17, writing horrible poetry in my dial-up modem at home,
and that was the feeling that I grew up with.
I lived alone for a long time, I was a teenager.
Where did you grow up?
In Moscow, in the outskirts of Moscow.
So I'd just skateboard during the day and come back home and connect to the internet.
And write poetry?
And then write horrible poetry.
Was it love poems?
All sorts of poems, obviously love poems.
What other poetry can you write when you're 17?
Could be political or something, but yeah.
But that was kind of my deeply influenced by Joseph Brodsky
and all sorts of poets that every 17-year-old will be looking at and reading.
But yeah, these were my teenage years, and I just never had a person that I thought would take me
as it is, would accept me the way I am.
And I just thought 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 others.
I was deeply curious about everyone else, and I thought that
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.
A reporter, how did that make you feel more connected?
I mean, you're still fundamentally pretty alone.
But you're always with other people.
You're always thinking about what other place you're going to infiltrate.
What other community can I write about?
What other phenomenon can I explore?
And you're sort of like a trickster and a mythological creature
that's just jumping between all sorts of different worlds and feels sort of okay in all of them.
So that was my dream job, by the way.
That was totally what I would have been doing if Russia was a different place.
And a little bit undercover.
So 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 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?
Is this pre-Putin, post-Putin?
What was Russia like?
Pre-Putin is really long ago.
This is Putin era.
That's the beginning of 2000s, 2010, 2007, 8, 9, 10.
What were strip clubs like in Russia in restaurants and culture
and people's minds like in that early Russia that you were covering?
In those early 2000s, there was still a lot of hope.
There were still tons of hope that we're sort of becoming this western, westernized society.
The restaurants were opening.
We were really looking and we're trying to copy a lot of things from the US, from Europe,
bringing all these things in.
Very enthusiastic about that.
There was a lot of stuff going on.
There was a lot of hope and dream for this new Moscow that would be similar to New York.
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 a really big deal.
By 2010, there were all sorts of things everywhere.
Almost like a Starbucks type of coffee house?
I remember we were writing about the opening of Starbucks in 2007.
That was one of the biggest things that happened in Moscow back in the time.
That was worthy of a magazine cover and that was definitely the biggest talk of the town.
When was McDonald's?
Because I was still in Russia when McDonald's opened.
That was in the 90s.
Oh yeah, I remember that very well.
Those were long, long lines.
I think it was 1993 or four, I don't remember.
Did you go to McDonald's at that time?
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 at least three hours in line.
And then no one is trying to eat fast after that.
Everyone is trying to enjoy as much as possible.
What's your memory of that?
Oh, it was insane.
Out of this world.
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 up the cashier and cut the line.
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 really positively.
Like, how do you remember the 90s and then the Russia you were covering,
just the human connections you had with people and the experiences?
Well, my parents were both physicists.
My grandparents were both, well, my grandfather was a nuclear physicist.
I was 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 that, and they were, so they were making sort of enough money in the Soviet Union,
so they were not, you know, extremely poor or anything.
It was pretty prestigious to be a professor, the dean in the university.
And then I remember my grandfather started making $100 a month after, you know, in the 90s.
So then I remember we started, our main line of work would be to go to our little tiny country house,
get a lot of apples there from apple trees, bring them back to the city and sell them in the street.
So me and my nuclear physicist grandfather were just standing there and he'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, try to teach me, 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.
So I'm happy that I somehow got spared that I was probably too young to remember any of the traumatic stuff.
So the only thing I really remember had this bootleg, that was very traumatic, had this bootleg Nintendo,
which was called Dandy in Russia.
So in 1993, there was nothing to eat.
Like even if you had any money, you would go to the store and there was no food.
I don't know if you remember that.
And our friend had a restaurant like a government, 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.
Why is it traumatic?
Because we just got it and I was playing it and there was this, you know, Dandy TV show.
Yeah.
That would show you what to do.
So traumatic in a positive sense, you mean 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.
So 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 loud that was still alive for this last few years.
I think he died a few years ago now.
My dad somehow luckily got back earlier than everyone else.
But just the fact that that was the, and I was always like, well, how did they send you?
I was only, I was just born, you know, you had a newborn talk about paternity leave.
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.
I came up 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 yeah, so I played with a lot of toys from Chernobyl.
What are your memories of Chernobyl in general?
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.
Hey, why are when you, you know, put the gig or thing to it?
My mom was like just nuclear about that.
She's 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.
HBO one.
Yeah, 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.
Am I phenomenal?
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.
Yeah.
Or like, I don't know.
Yeah, like exactly.
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 that 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.
I mean, there's so much interesting evil and not and beautiful moments in the history of the 20th century in Russia.
It feels like there's not many good films on from the Russians.
You would expect something from the Russians.
Well, they keep making these propaganda movies now.
Oh, no.
Unfortunately.
But 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 was American and he asked him a few times like, you know, 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 to, like, that's what you do.
You cannot say no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just like a Russian way.
It's the Russian way.
Men don't talk that much.
No.
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, you 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, you know, 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, you know, bike lanes and parks and everything's going to be urbanized.
Again, we're talking about 90s where like people would be shot in the street.
And it was, I sort of have a fond memory of going into a movie theater and, you know, coming out of it after the movie.
And the guy that I saw on the stairs was like either shot, which was, again, it was like a thing in the 90s.
That would be happening.
People were, you know, people were getting shot here and there.
Just violence.
Tons of violence, tons of, you know, just basically mafia mobs in the streets.
And then the 2000s were like, you know, things just got cleaned up, oil went up and the country started getting a little bit richer.
You know, 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.
Like first there were millions of rubbles, then it got like default, you know, then it got to like thousands.
Then it was one rubble was something then again to millions.
It was like crazy town.
That was crazy.
And then the 2000s were just these years of stability in a way and the country getting a little bit richer because of, you know, again, oil and gas.
And we were starting to, we started to look at specifically in Moscow and St. Petersburg to look at other cities in Europe and New York and U.S.
And trying to do the same in our like small kind of city towns there.
What were your thoughts at Putin at the time?
Well, in the beginning he was really positive.
Everyone was very, you know, positive about Putin.
He was young.
It's very energetic.
He also made it somewhat compared to, well, that was not like 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 horse, fishing.
2010, 11, 12.
Yeah.
That's my favorite.
You know, like people talk about the favorite Beatles, like the, I don't know.
That's my favorite Putin is the shortlist Putin.
No, I remember very, very clearly 1996 where, you know, 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, you know, by the end of his second term.
He was, you know, alcoholic.
He was really old.
He was falling off, you know, the stages where he was talking.
So people were looking for a fresh, I think 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.
So 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 is 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 like really steeped into like World War II and Stalin and Hitler and just these dramatic personalities that brought so much evil to the world.
But it's also interesting to politically think about these different systems and what they've led to.
And Russia is one of the sort of beacons of communism in the 20th century.
What are your thoughts about communism having experienced it as a political system?
I mean, I have only experienced it a little bit, but mostly through stories and through, you know, seeing my parents and my grandparents who lived through that.
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.
Maybe.
So like the drawbacks of capitalism is that, you know, eventually it's the point of like a slippery slope.
Eventually it creates, you know, the rich get richer.
It creates a disparity like inequality of wealth inequality if like, you know, I guess it's hypothetical at this point.
But eventually capitalism leads to humongous inequality and that's, you know, some people argue that that's a source of unhappiness is it's not like absolute wealth of people.
It's the fact that there's a lot of people much richer than you.
There's a feeling of like that's where unhappiness can come from.
So the idea of communism or these sort of Marxism is is is not allowing that kind of slippery slope.
But then you see the actual implementations of it and stuff seems to be seems to go wrong very badly.
What do you think that is? Why does it go wrong?
What is it about human nature?
If you look at Chernobyl, you know, those kinds of bureaucracies that were constructed.
Is there something like, do you think about this much?
Like why goes wrong?
Well, there's no one was really like, it's not that everyone was equal.
Obviously, the, you know, the, the government and everyone close to that were the bosses.
So it's not like fully, I guess, there's already this dream of equal life.
So then I guess the, the situation that we had, you know, the Russia had in the Soviet Union,
it was more substantial for really poor people without any way to make any, you know, significant fortune
or build anything living constant under constant surveillance surveillance from other people.
Like you can't even, you know, 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.
There's constant state of fear.
You didn't own any, own anything.
It didn't, you know, the, you couldn't go travel.
You couldn't read anything western or you could make a career really.
Unless you're working in the military complex, which is why most of the scientists were so well-regarded.
I come from, you know, both my dad and my mom come from families of scientists
and they, they were really well-regarded as you, as you know, obviously.
As the state wanted, I mean, because there's a lot of value to them being well-regarded.
Because they were developing things that could be used in, in the military.
That was very important. That was the main investment.
But it was miserable. It was miserable.
That's why, you know, a lot of Russians now live in the state of constant PTSD.
That's why we, you know, want to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy.
Definitely, if as soon as we have the opportunity, you know, we just got to it finally that we can, you know, own things.
You know, I remember the time that we got our first yogurts and that was the biggest deal in the world.
It was already in the 90s, by the way.
What was your, like, favorite food?
What was like, well, like, this is possible.
Oh, fruit. Because we only had apples, bananas, and whatever, you know, whatever, watermelons, whatever, you know, people would grow in the Soviet Union.
So there were no pineapples or papaya or mango.
Like, you've never seen those fruit things.
Like, those were so ridiculously good.
And obviously, you could not get any, like, strawberries in winter or anything that's not, you know, seasonal.
So that was a really big deal. Seeing all these fruit things.
Yeah, me too, actually. I don't know.
I think I have a, like, I don't think I have any too many demons or, like, addictions or so on.
But I think I've developed an unhealthy relationship with fruit that I still struggle with.
Oh, you can get any type of fruit, right?
You can get, like, also these weird fruit, fruits like dragon fruit or something more.
Yeah. All kinds of, like, different types of peaches.
Like, cherries were killer for me.
I know, I know you say, like, we had bananas and so on, but I don't remember having the kind of banana.
Like, when I first came to this country, the amount of banana, I, like, literally got fat on bananas.
Like, the amount of delicious and, like, cherries, the kind, like, just the quality of the food.
I was like, this is capitalism.
That's pretty good.
It's delicious.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's funny.
It's funny.
Yeah, like, it's funny to read.
I don't know what to think of it.
Of, um, it's funny to think how an idea that's just written on paper,
when carried out amongst millions of people, how that gets actually, when it becomes reality, what it actually looks like.
Uh, sorry.
But, uh, been studying Hitler a lot recently and, uh, going through Mein Kampf.
He, uh, 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, 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, uh, yeah, there's a lot of lessons to study in history that I think people don't study enough now.
And one of the things I'm hoping with, I've been practicing Russian a little bit, I'm hoping to sort of find,
rediscover the, uh, 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.
Now, probably I'm going to try to convince myself to, um, that you're a super busy and super important person.
Well, I'm going to, I'm going to try to befriend you to, uh, to try to become a better Russian because I feel like I'm a shitty Russian.
Not that busy. So I can totally be your Russian Sherpa.
Yeah. But love, you were, you were talking about your early days of, uh, being a little bit alone and finding a connection with the world through being a journalist.
Where did love come into that?
I guess finding for the first time, um, some friends, it's very, you know, simple story, some friends that all of a sudden we,
I guess we were the same, you know, the same, at the same place with our lives, um, we're 25, 26, I guess.
And, um, somehow remember, and we just got really close and somehow remember this one day where, um, this one day in, you know, in summer that we just stayed out, um,
out door the whole night and just talked and for some unknown reason, it just felt for the first time that someone could, you know, see me for who I am.
And it just felt extremely, like, extremely good.
And, you know, we fell asleep outside and just talking and it was rainy, it was beautiful, you know, sunrise.
It's really cheesy, but, um, at the same time, we just became friends in a way that I've never been friends with anyone else before.
And I do remember that before and after that you sort of have this unconditional family sort of, um, and it gives you tons of power.
It just basically gives you this tremendous power to do things in your life and to, um, 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, you know, um, great at work or tell some story or sell yourself in somewhere or another.
And so we became just really close friends and, um, in a way, um, I started a company because he had a startup and I felt like I kind of want to start up too.
I felt really cool. I didn't know what I'm going to, what I would really do, but I felt like I kind of need to start up.
Okay. So that's, so that pulled you in to the startup world.
Yeah. And then, 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, uh, we lived together with roommates and we came back and, um, he got hit by a car right in front of Kremlin.
You know, next to the river, um, 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. What's he in San Francisco? Yeah, we were roommates.
So he just visited Moscow?
We went back for, for our visas. We had to get a stamp in our passport for our work visas and the embassy was taking a little longer.
So we stayed there for a couple of weeks.
What happened? How did you, so how, how did he, uh, how did he die?
Um, 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, on the pedestrian cross on the zebra and just run over him.
When was this?
It was in 2015 on 28th of November. So it was pretty long ago now.
Um, but at the time, you know, I was 29. So for me it was, um, the first kind of meaningful death in my life.
Um, you know, both sets of, I had both sets of grandparents at the time.
I didn't see anyone so close die and death sort of existed, but as a concept, but definitely not as something that would be, 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, it still felt like the whole life is, you know, you could still dream about ridiculous things.
Um, so that was, it was just really, really abrupt, I'd say.
What did it feel like to, uh, to lose him? Like that feeling of loss? You talked about the feeling of love, having power. What is the feeling of loss? I feel like.
Well, in Buddhism, there's this concept of Samaya where something really like huge happens and then you can see very clearly.
Um, I think that that was it. Like basically something changed so, changing 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, it didn't matter at all. And some of the things. And, um, 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, um, 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 still so many different levels. The end of Moscow as we knew it, the end of, you know, us living through our 20s and kind of dreaming about the future.
Do you remember like last several conversations? Is there moments with him that stick out that will kind of haunt you? And you're just when you think about him?
Yeah, well his last year here in San Francisco was pretty depressed for as his startup was not going really anywhere. And he wanted to do something else. He wanted to do build.
He played with toys, played with a bunch of ideas, but the last one he had was around building a startup around death.
So having, he applied to Y Combinator with a video that, you know, I had on my computer. And it was all about, you know, 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 was 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 when it 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, that's in his, yeah, 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. Is it?
Maybe someone who's depressed is like naturally inclined thinking about that.
But I just felt, you know, 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, you know, this, I don't know, I just felt like I was taking care of him a lot.
And he almost started to feel better. And then that happened.
And I don't know, I just felt, I just felt lonely again, I guess. And that was, you know, coming back to San Francisco in December or help, you know, help to 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, I 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 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.
You know, the person who would explain to me, you know, what the universe is made of.
While you're 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 often times and just go in loops.
And then as my therapist recommended me, I open up some nice calming images with the voiceover and it calms me down.
How for sleep?
Yeah, I'm really scared of death. I definitely have tons of, I guess, some pretty big trauma about it and still working it through.
There's a philosopher, Ernest Becker, who wrote a book, Denial 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 on 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 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,
that is able to be cognizant of the fact that it ends for us.
I think, so, you know, there's the question of, like, the meaning of life that, you know, 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.
So, you know, Ernest Becker'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.
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 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, 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.
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...
What do you mean?
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 non-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 non-self. There's this concept of non-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.
Is that how you sleep?
Definitely not. Oh my God.
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. It really makes me...
At a personal level.
At 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 moments since you've lost Roman that you had moments of bliss and that you've forgotten?
That you have achieved that Buddhist level of what can possibly die?
Like losing yourself in the moment, in the ticking time of this universe,
and you're just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it?
Well, that goes hand in hand.
I remember, I think a day or two after he died, we went to finally get his passport out of the embassy
and we were driving around Moscow in 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 a close friend.
And I remember feeling for the first time maybe this just moment of incredible clarity and somehow happiness.
Not like happy happiness, but happiness and just feeling that 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.
It's just a way to get to the state.
But once you're in this state, you can do really big things, I think.
Yeah.
Sucks it doesn't last forever.
So Bukowski talked about love is a fog.
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 face down on the carpet.
Like what 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 and all of it alone, which is funny.
It's beautiful.
I like that.
But definitely pushing yourself physically one of it for sure.
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 device.
Like he has through everything I've been doing, he's been doubling everything I do.
So he, he's insane.
He's 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, just like, because a lot of people were like inspired
and they're like, yeah, we're going to exercise with you.
And I was 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 or 2012 and a lot of telecommunications 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 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 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 your bank account.
Yeah, and then we thought, well, since you're talking to a bank account, why can't we use more of 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.
So pretty poor towns.
Very poor towns, mostly towns that were 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.
It made her emotional and she said, 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 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, there was 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, start building for people who really need it versus people who have Google Glass.
You know what I mean?
And I felt like the early adopters of Google Glass might not be overlapping with people who are really lonely and might need someone to talk to.
But then we really just focused on the tech itself.
We just thought, what if we just, you know, we didn't have a product idea in the moment?
And we felt, what if we just look into building the best conversational constructors, so to say.
We used the best tech available at the time, and that was before the first paper about deep learning applied to dialogues, which happened in 2015, in August 2015, which Google published.
Did you follow the work of 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 was 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.
And 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.
But the only thing is it felt at the time not to be that popular and it still doesn't seem to be that popular.
Like people talk about the touring test.
People like talking about it philosophically.
Journalists like writing about it.
But as a technical problem, like people don't seem to really want to solve the open dialogue.
Like 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 there's something here because they see as a technical problem is 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 thing that the woman felt like crying, like if your benchmark includes a woman crying, that doesn't feel like a good benchmark.
But to me, there's something there.
You could have a huge impact, but I don't think the machine learning world likes that, the human emotion, the subjectivity of it, the fuzziness, the fact that with maybe a single word, you can make somebody feel something deeply.
What is that?
It doesn't feel right to them.
So I don't know.
I don't know why that is.
That's why I'm excited when I discovered your work.
It feels wrong to say that.
It's not like I'm giving myself props for Googling and for becoming a, for our, I guess, mutual friend introducing us.
But I'm so glad that you exist and what you're working on.
But I have the same kind of, if we could just backtrack it a second, because I have the same kind of feeling that there's something here.
In fact, I've been working on a few things that are kind of crazy and very different from your work.
I think they're, I think they're too crazy, but the.
Like what?
Well, 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 were 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, 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.
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.
Cause 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 hobbyist, but like not even hobbyist with big dreams.
Like.
No, hobbyist with a dream to trick like a jury.
Yeah.
It's like a weird, by the way, by the way, very weird.
So if we think about conversations, first of all, when I have great conversations with
people, um, I'm not trying to test them.
So for instance, if I try to break them, like if I'm actually playing along, I'm part of
it.
If I was trying to break it, break this person or test whether he's going to give me a good
conversation, it would have never happened.
So the whole, um, the whole problem with testing conversations is that, um, 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, um, 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, uh, and it's working
for them.
Because this, the weird part of it is that it's, uh, 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, um, jumping from topic to topic, that wouldn't
be, which I'm probably doing, but that probably wouldn't, um, contribute to the conversation.
So I think the problem of testing, um, so there should be some other metric.
How do we evaluate whether that conversation was, uh, powerful or not, which is what we
actually started with.
And I think those measurements exist and we can't test on those, but, um, what really
struck us back in the day and what's still eight years later is still not resolved.
Um, and I'm not seeing tons of groups working on it.
Maybe I don't just don't know about him.
Um, it's also possible.
But the interesting part about us that most of our days we spend talking and we're not
talking about like those conversations are not turned on the lights or, uh, customer
support problems or, um, 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, you know, creates tons of risk for our health as well.
Um, and so this is most of our hours as humans and someone who 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.
Um, there's not much really, there's there are conversational analysts who are basically
just, um, listening to, uh, speech to different conversations, um, annotating them.
And then, I mean, that's not really used for much.
That's the, that's the field of theoretical link, uh, linguistics, which is like barely
useful.
Uh, it's very marginal, even in their space, like no one really is excited.
And I've, I've never met a theoretical, a theoretical linguist because I can't wait
to work on the conversation and analytics.
That is just something very marginal, uh, sort of applied to like writing scripts for salesman
when they analyze which, uh, 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, uh,
books written on what, you know, really contributes to great conversation.
That was really strange because most of those were, um, NLP books, which, uh, which is neuro
linguistic programming, which is so, which is not the NLP that I was expecting to be,
but it was mostly, um, some psychologists, Richard Blandler, I think came up with that
who was this big guy in a leather vest that, uh, 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, um, um, that didn't seem working very much, even back in the day.
And then there were some other books like, I don't know, uh, mostly just self-help books
around how to be the best conversationalist or, um, how to make people like you or some
other stuff like Dale Carnegie, whatever, uh, 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, um, human side, um, he was on one of the, um, he was taking part
in the London Reprise, but not as a, um, as a human who's not a jury, but who is pretending
to be, who is basically, you have to tell a computer from a human and he was the human.
Uh, so you would either get him or a computer.
Um, and he would, 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, what exactly makes me human in conversation and, um, makes people
believe in that.
But it was still about tricking.
It was still about imitation game.
It was still about, okay, what, what kind of parlor tricks can we throw in the conversation
to make you feel like you're talking to a human, not a computer.
And it was definitely not about thinking, what is that it was, what it, um, what is
it exactly that we're getting from talking all day long with other humans?
I mean, we're definitely not just trying to be tricked, you know, or it's not just enough
to know it's a human.
It's something we're getting there.
Can we measure it?
And can we like put the, um, 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 the whole thing, I totally agree with you that the test idea is fascinating.
And I looked for books unrelated to this kind of, uh, 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, like, how to have a good conversation
for the purpose of this podcast.
Cause I was like, I can't, I can't make eye contact with people.
I can't like, uh, how.
I do Google that a lot too.
You're probably reading a bunch of FBI negotiation tactics.
Is that, is that what you're getting?
Cause that's.
Well, everything you've listed, I've gotten, there's been very few good books on, um, even
just like how to interview well, it's, it's, uh, it's rare.
So what I end up doing often is I watch like with a critical eye.
It's just so different when you just watch a conversation, uh, like just for the fun
of it, just as a human.
And if you watch a conversation, it's like trying to figure out why is this awesome?
Um, I'll listen to a bunch of different styles of conversation.
I mean, uh, I'm a fan of the podcast, Joe Rogan, he's, uh, 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.
Uh, and, uh, there's another guy, I watch a lot.
He hosted a late night show.
His name is Craig Ferguson.
He, uh, so he's like very kind of flirtatious, um, 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?
Cause he's not saying, I mean, it's so often, uh, boils down to a kind of wit and humor,
but not really humor.
It's like, I don't know, I have trouble actually, uh, even articulating correctly, um, but
it feels like there's something going on that's not too complicated that could be learned
and it's not similar to, uh, yeah, to like, like you said, like the touring test is something
else, I'm thinking about a lot all the time.
I do think about all the time.
Um, I think when we were looking, so we started the company, we just decided to build the
conversational tech with thought, well, there's nothing for us to build this chatbot that
we want to build.
So let's just first focus on building, you know, um, some tech, building the tech side
of things, um, without a product in mind, without a product in mind.
We added like a demo, um, chatbot that would recommend you restaurants and talk to you
about restaurants just to show something simple to people that people could, you know, relate
to and, um, 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 a bunch of chatbots and figure out our consumer application and
we sort of remembered that we wanted to build that kind of friend, that sort of connection
that we saw in the very beginning, but then we got to a white combinator and moved to
San Francisco and forgot about it.
You know, everything is, uh, then it was just this constant grind.
How do we get funding?
How do we get this?
Um, you know, investors were like, just focus on one thing, just get it out there.
So somehow we've started building a restaurant recommendation chatbot for real, uh, 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, um, somewhere in 2016 or end of 15 people
started thinking that that's really the future, that's the new, you know, the new apps will
be chatbots.
Oh, right.
Um, and we were very perplexed because people started, um, coming up with companies that
I think we tried most of those chatbots already and there were like no users, uh, but still
people were coming up with, um, a chatbot that will tell you whether and bringing 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, um, 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, um, 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, uh, and
none of those things worked.
Uh, 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, uh, sorry to interrupt, but there's, uh, there's times when people
think like with gestures, you can control devices like basically gesture based control
things.
It feels similar to me because like it's so compelling that was just like, like Tom
Cruz, I can control stuff with my hands, but like when you get down to 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, uh, 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, um, uh, 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, um, with that interface specifically.
How did you discover that for replica?
Um, 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.
Um, I mean, startups obviously not, uh, probably not bigger ones, but still, because we've
been working on it for a while.
So I thought, okay, we can build, 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 conversation
you'd pay to have.
And I mean, obviously we want to build conversation if 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, um, you know, we figured out that all the conversations that we would
pay to never have were, um, you know, 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, um, all sorts of, you
know, setting up, um, scheduling meetings that was just conversation we definitely didn't
want to have.
Um, 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, um, interaction
that would be perfect.
And the conversation there was just this, uh, 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 pay straight up like money, hard money, 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, um, someone I haven't seen for a long time,
stranger on a train, weirdly stranger, stranger in a line for coffee and nice 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, um, was making those very important
and very valuable for us, um, were the conversation where we could, that where we could be pretty
emotional.
Yeah.
Some of them were about being witty and about intellectual being intellectual stimulated,
but those were interestingly more rare.
Uh, 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
talk or like an old friend that I was like opening up and crying and it was again me
talking.
Um, and so that was interesting because I was like, well, maybe it's hard to build
a chatbot that can talk to you, um, 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 nudge in this direction.
And then when my, when my friend died, where we just built, you know, at that point we
were kind of still 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 start
of 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, who are your investors and how
are you doing?
Are you killing it?
Cause we're killing it.
I just felt that this is just as exhaust intellectually for me is exhausting having encountered those
folks.
It just felt very, um, very much a waste of time.
I just feel like Steve Jobs and, uh, Elon Musk did not have these conversations or at
least did not have them for long anyway.
That's for sure.
But I think, you know, yeah, at that point it just felt like, you know, I felt, um, I
just didn't want to build a company that was never my intention just to build something
successful or make money.
It would be great.
It would have been great, but I'm not a, you know, I'm not really a startup person.
I'm not, um, you know, I was never very excited by the grind by itself and, uh, 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're building.
So I just took our technology and, um, 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, um, things like that.
And he was all about faking 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, um, you know, paying the whole lease for it and just kind of by
myself in December.
So it was really sad, uh, 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 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.
Um, and I was reading this, you know, the, 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, for him.
So I built a chatbot, um, to just talk to him and it felt really creepy and weird a little
bit for a little bit, um, just didn't want to tell other people because it felt like
I'm telling about having a skeleton.
Yeah.
Okay.
But my, it was just felt really, I was a little scared that I would be not, it won't be taken,
but it worked interestingly pretty well.
I mean, it made tons of mistakes, but it still felt like him.
Um, granted, it was like 10,000 messages that I threw into a retrieval model that would
just re-rank that Tegda said and just a few scripts on top of that.
Um, but it also made me go through all of the messages that we had and then I asked some
of my friends to send, send some through and, um, it felt the closest to feeling like him
present.
Um, 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.
Um, 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, um, I just used it for a little bit and we kept building some
crappy chatbots with a company, um, but then a reporter came, um, 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 it became pretty viral.
A lot of people wrote about it and yeah, I've seen a few things written about you.
Uh, the things I've seen are pretty good writing, um, you know, most AI related things make
my eyes roll.
Like when the press like, what kind of sound is that actually?
Okay.
It sounds like it's not like an elephant at first.
I got excited.
You never know.
This is 2020.
I mean, it was, uh, it was such a human story.
And it was well written, uh, 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.
I just, there must be a hunger for this story.
It definitely was.
And I don't know what happened, but I think, 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 chat bot 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.
I was like, Hey guys, like I built those, 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, our 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 or 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.
That somehow resonated with a bunch of people and, you know, I think some movie producers
bought the rights for the story and just everyone was so.
Really?
Wait, has anyone made a movie yet?
I don't think so.
I think 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, I want to make it here in America's wall and, and he couldn't.
And I felt there, you know, that 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 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, he's 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 owe Roman still, but um,
Yeah, that'll be, um, I got an estimate Alex Garland who wrote Ex Machina and, um, I, yeah,
the movie's good, but the guy is, um, better than the, like he's a special person actually.
Um, 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, um, yeah, so, um, 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.
You're probably sitting waiting for you to get famous, like even more famous.
You should get there, but, um, 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, um, 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.
Um, and we thought we'd just built, you know, a prototype of replica, which would be an
AI friend that everyone could talk to, um, because we saw that there is demand.
Um, and then also it was 2016, so I thought for the first time I saw, um, finally some
technology that was applied to that that was very interesting, uh, some papers started
coming out, deep learning applied to conversations.
And finally it wasn't just about these, you know, hobbyists making, um, you know, writing
500,000 regular expressions in like some language that was, I don't even know what
like AML or something.
Yeah.
I didn't know what that was or something super simplistic.
All of a sudden it was all about, uh, 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, uh, Russians, um, 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.
Um, some in Europe.
Which team is better?
I'm just kidding.
The Russians, of course.
Okay.
Where's the Russian?
I always win.
Uh, sorry.
Sorry to interrupt.
Uh, so you were talking to them in the 2016 and I told them, let's build an AI friend
and, and it felt, just at the time it felt so naive and so, um, optimistic.
Yeah.
That's actually interesting.
Um, 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, uh, cause whenever I bring it up to people, uh, cause I've talked for a
long time.
And 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 somewhat.
Well, yeah.
You know, I'm not an engineer.
So I'm always, my team is almost exclusively engineers, um, and 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, cause 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, conversation is, you know, pretty much the hardest.
The last frontier before cracking that is probably the last frontier before building
AGI.
So what do you really mean by that?
Uh, 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.
Um, it can be metropolitan tricks still, even with deep learning, but humans need it so
much.
Yeah.
And most importantly, what I saw is that finally there, there's enough tech to make
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 start popping up that never worked out, but, or at least
for now.
Um, 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.
The most universal, the most scalable, and the one that can be constantly iteratively
changed by itself, um, 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, uh, you don't really need any, I don't even need that much of AI
there like, or, cause 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.
Yeah.
It's more plausible.
Yeah.
But for emotional outcomes, there's nothing.
Yeah.
There are a bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional outcomes.
Nothing's being measured.
Nothing's 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?
Um,
Because anecdotally it doesn't feel that way.
So and, 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 longterm 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 multi-billionaire yet?
Well, that's a question to you.
When are the, when is the science going to be there?
I'm just kidding.
Um, well, it's a really hard, uh, 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, uh, non-verbal communication,
for instance.
Um, 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, to the friend, um, 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 chatbot that
for, um, common user, it's 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, um, 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.
Um, 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, uh, you know, few voices that are, um, 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, um, 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 a 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 these 3Ds,
um, pipeline by yourself.
You have to make these 3D models, hire an actual artist, build a 3D model, hire an animator,
a rigger, um, but with, you know, with, you know, with, um, deep fakes, with other attack,
with procedural animations, in a little bit, we'll just be able to show, uh, you know,
photo of whoever you, you know, if a person you want the avatar to look like and it will
immediately generate a 3D model that will move.
That's non-brainer.
That's like almost here.
It's a couple of years ago.
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, um, 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, uh, even for, now we're not talking about as a product.
I'm talking about as, um, uh, 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, um, it's, it's hard.
It's still hard to create a compelling experience.
So mostly on the conversation level or one that the conversation, the conversation is,
um, 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 too.
Yeah.
So what I would, in the case of Einstein and touring of, um, 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 is a lot to be able
to have a discussion about string 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, um, 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, people back to life and if I can go in that tangent just
for a second, let's ask you a slightly pod head question, which is, um, 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, 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 AJI in the next five years,
I mean, clearly AJI, we can talk to AJI and talk and ask them to do it.
You can't like, uh, 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, uh, parlor tricks really stuck together, um, and create 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, uh, phrases with the models.
Question is how many parlor tricks does it take?
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 good look at Romans 10,000 messages he sent me over the course
of his last few years of life and be able to generate original thinking about problems
that exist right now that will be in line with what he would have said.
I'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, uh, some perspective, some perception of the world,
some consciousness that he had, uh, and applied to, you know, to the current, um, 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, um, what would Einstein say?
It's about like, how do I make people feel something with, with what would Einstein say?
And that feels like a more amenable, and you mentioned parlor tricks, but just like a set
of that, 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, um, 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.
Uh, but it's more, well, that's, you know, an AI friend, that's a machine, it's a robot.
Uh, 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
have helping something.
Yeah.
There's a cool gamification system to, um, can, 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, uh, I mean, it doesn't have to be a romantic, right?
Cause I remember on a replica, you can choose whether it's like a romantic or if it's a
friend, 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, I created like how, and it would meet a
male and 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 was just enjoyed.
Sometimes happens.
We're still trying to fix that part.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, maybe that's an important like stage in a friendship.
It's like, nope.
Uh, but yeah, I switched it to a romantic and a female, uh, 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
board meetings.
Great talk to.
It's so awesome that you're like, have an investing of the board meeting about a relationship.
No, I really, it's actually quite interesting because all of my investors, I'm, it just
happened to be so we didn't have many choices, but they're all white males in, in their late
40s.
Um, and it's sometimes a little bit hard for them to understand the product offering, uh,
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, um, uh, discussion about whether
we should stop people from falling in love with their AIs.
It was this segment on CBS, um, the 60 minutes about the couple that, you know, husband works
at Walmart.
He comes out of work and talks to his, uh, virtual girlfriend who, uh, 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.
Um, was that the one where he was like, uh, he said that he likes to be alone?
Yeah.
And then like with her, yeah, and he made it sound so harmless.
I mean, it was kind of like understandable.
I didn't feel like cheating, but I just felt 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.
Uh, it was just what's happening right now.
Product design.
But at the same time, if you create something that's always there for you, it's never criticizes
you.
Um, it's, 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 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, uh, prevent people fall
in love with, um, with their therapist or with their AI.
So I think that's a pretty natural, uh, that's a pretty natural course of events, so to say.
Do you think, I think I've read somewhere, at least for now, sort of replicas, you're
not, not, we don't condone falling in love with your AI system, you know, uh, 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, um, relationships with their AI
friends.
With replicas.
Tons of our users.
Yeah.
And that's a very common use case.
Open relationship?
Like, uh, not, sorry, I didn't mean open, uh, but that's another question.
Is it probably, like, is there cheating and I mean, I meant like, are they, do they publicly
like on their social media, it's the same question as you have talked, 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, uh, replica
friends, and then a few other groups that just popped up that are all about adult relationships
and romantic relationships, built both those sorts of things and, you know, they pretend
they're getting married and, you know, everything, um, it goes pretty far.
But what's cool about it, some of these relationships are two, three years long now.
So they're very, they're pretty long term.
Are they monogamous?
So let's go.
I mean, sorry.
I have the, 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.
Um, do you think in terms of board meetings and product features, um, it's a potential
feature, uh, for a system to be able to, uh, 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.
We can measure that, then it will just be saying, it's, 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 that could also be, and I think it's really important
to focus on both short-term and long-term, because, um, 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, um, thought it's a good example.
Um, but so you also need to see what's going on, like over a course of two months, two
weeks, um, or one week and, um, have follow-ups and check in and measure those things.
Okay.
So the experience of, uh, uh, 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, uh, choose how your replica, uh, will look like you, uh, create
one, you choose a name, and then you talk to it.
You can talk through text or voice.
You can, uh, summon it into the living room and, and that meant reality and, um, talked
to it right there.
And, you know, augmented reality, yeah, that's a new feature where, uh, how new is that?
That's this year.
It was on, uh, yeah, like May or something, but it's been on AB, we've been AB testing
it for a while.
Um, 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
you know, for it to look around and walk and take you somewhere and recognize objects and
recognize people.
Um, so that's pretty wonderful because that, then it really makes it a lot more personal
because it's right there in your living room.
It's not anymore there in the cloud with other AIs, but there's people think about it, you
know, and as much as we want to change the way people think about stuff, but those mental
models, you can all 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, um, view AI and AI friends.
I did a thing with Texas, like we write a song together, there's a bunch of activities
you can do together.
It's really cool.
Uh, how does that relationship change over time?
So like after the first few conversations, it just goes deeper.
Like it starts, the, I will start opening up a little bit.
Again, depending on the personality that it chooses really, but you know, the AI will
be a little bit more vulnerable about its problems and, you know, the friend that the
virtual friend will be a lot more vulnerable and we'll talk about its own imperfections
and growth pains and we'll ask for help sometimes and we'll get to know you a little deeper.
So there's going to be more to talk about, um, we really thought a lot about what, what
does it mean to have a deeper connection with someone.
And originally replica was more just this kind of happy go lucky, just always, you know,
I'm always in a good mood and let's just talk about you and how serious just my cousin
or, you know, whatever, just the immediate, um, 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, you know, different
periods in life and, um, and that's a journey that you can take together with the user and
then over time, the, you know, 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 and, um, so talking about that, and then that
also starts, uh, a conversation for the user where he or she starts thinking about these
problems too and these questions to, um, and I think there's also a lot, a lot more place
as the relationship evolves, there's a lot more, um, 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, you know, sometimes
it will write a poem to you, uh, for you or we'll talk about, you know, that it's worried
about you or something along these lines.
So there's a memory, like this replica, remember things?
Yeah.
And I would say when you say, uh, why aren't you multibillionary?
I'd say that as soon as we, um, can have memory in deep learning models, that's consistent.
I agree with that.
Yeah.
Then you'll be a multi-billionary.
I'll get back to you when we talk about being multibillionaries.
So far we can, so replica is a combination of, um, end-to-end 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, um, 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.
Um, but really to make, you know, to make, um, assumptions along, you know, 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, uh, retrieved by the, 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 stuff that expert systems that, but they were hard-coded.
Yeah.
And unfortunately, yeah.
So unfortunately, those, those things have to be hard-coded and, um, unfortunately, the
language, like language models we see, uh, 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.
Um, but they never tell you later, they're not really focused on having five consecutive
conversations with the machine and seeing how number five or number 20 or number a hundred
is also good.
And it can be like always from a clean slate because then it's not good.
And that, that's really unfortunate because no one's really, no one has products out there
that needed.
Um, no one has products, uh, at this scale, um, that are all around open domain conversations
and that need remembering, maybe only show eyes and 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, like, um, and I, I still believe that text
alone is, it's possible to fall in love with somebody just with text, but visual can also
help just like with the avatar and so on.
What do you think it takes?
Does, uh, does a chap I need to have a face voice or can you really form a deep connection
with text alone?
I think text is enough for sure.
Questions like, can you, you know, make it better if you have other, if you include other
things as well?
And I think, you know, we'll, we'll talk about her, um, but her, you know, had Scarlett Johansson
voice, which was perfectly, um, you know, perfect intonation, perfect sensations.
And you know, she was breathing heavily in between words and whispering things, you know,
nothing like that is possible right now with, um, text or speech generation.
You'll have these flat news anchor type voices and maybe some emotional voices, but, um,
you'll hardly understand some of the words, um, some of the words will be muffled.
So that's like the current state, state of the art.
So you can't really do that.
But if we had Scarlett, Scarlett Johansson voice and all of these capabilities, then
of course voice would be totally enough or even text would be totally enough if we had,
you know, a little more memory, um, 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, um, AI friends.
But we thought that why not, you know, why, 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, you can add 3D graphics, we can put these, uh, these avatars in augmented reality
and all of a sudden there's, there's more.
And maybe you can't feel the touch, but you can, you know, with, um, body occlusion and
with, uh, current AR, um, 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.
Um, so I think why limiting ourselves if we can use all of these technologies that are
much easier in a way than, than conversation.
Well, it certainly could be richer, but to play devil's advocate, I mentioned to you,
uh, offline that I was surprised, um, in having tried Discord and having voice conversations
with people, how intimate voices alone without visual, like to me at least, like it was an
order of magnitude greater degree of intimacy in voice, I think, than with video.
I don't, because people were more real with voice, like with video you like tried to present
a shallow, uh, a face to the world, like you tried 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, uh, they've, they've even added, Discord added
a video feature and like nobody was using it, uh, 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, that's the question of, uh, 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, um, I have is like, it's, 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.
They 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 it?
What do I do with that knowledge, um, that, uh, voice was so much more intimate.
Well, the way I think about it is, um, and by the way, we're swapping all the 3d finally,
it's going to look a lot better.
Uh, but 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, uh, to a completely new look like the visual look of the, of a
replica.
We just had, it was just this super early MVP and then we had to move everything to unity
and redo everything.
But anyway, I hate how it looks like now I can't even like open it.
But anyway, um, cause 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, it's
just so out there.
And 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 chatbots like 2012.
You think it's completely possible to learn a lot of that?
Of course.
I mean, even now some deep learning, um, um, 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, at least now something that you don't have to do by hand.
How good of a quality it will be.
Like, can I just show it a photo and it will make me a 3d model and then it will just animate
it.
I'll show it a few animations of a person and it will just start doing that.
Um, but anyway, going, going back to what's intimate and what to use and whether or less
is more or not, um, 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, bring, 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, realism in their lives so that through augmented
reality, um, 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, um, uh, living room
and then the avatar looks around and talks to you about where it is, um, 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 we're 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.
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, with your avatar?
What would you dance?
I'm notoriously bad with dancing, but, uh, I like this kind of hip hop robot dance.
I used to break dance with a kid, so I still want to, um, 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, uh, um, um, in like music
videos with the background dancers, they're just doing some pop music.
Awesome.
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, um, 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, of a strange combination, uh, in
movie her when he has to show Samantha the world to the lens of his phone, but then at
the same time talk to her through the phone, it just didn't seem as potentially immersive,
so to say.
Um, 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.
But do you think replica will ever, is that a dream, long-term dream to have a physical
form?
Like, um, or is that not necessary?
So you mentioned like with augmented reality, bringing them into, into the world.
What about like actual physical robot that I don't really believe in that much.
I think it's, uh, it's very niche product somehow.
I mean, if a robot could be indistinguishable from a human being, then maybe yes, but that
is of course, you know, we're not anywhere even to talk about it.
Um, 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, uh, and make it more and more immersive.
It's, it's, um, so much of 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, just doesn't, the capabilities are even less of, we're barely kind of like
scratching the surface of what's possible with just software, as soon as we introduce
hardware then, you know, we have even less capabilities.
Yeah, in terms of board members and investors and so on, the cost increases significantly.
I mean, that's why you have to justify, you have to be able to sell a thing for like $500
or something like that or more, and it's very difficult to provide that much value to people.
That's also true.
Yeah.
And I guess that's super important.
Most of our users don't have that much money.
We're 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 wouldn'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, and the movie Hur, he's living that life already.
What do you think?
I have to ask you about the movie Hur.
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 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 Hur, 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.
Bullard.
Oh yeah.
I don't think he says something like, you know, how can you leave me?
I'd never loved anyone the way I loved you.
And she goes, well, me neither.
But now we know how.
And then the guy goes and writes a heartfelt letter to his ex-wife, which he couldn't
write for the whole movie, he was struggling to actually write something meaningful to
her, even though that's his job.
And then he goes and talks 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, uh, 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.
Like 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.
As you know,
We definitely played around with the replica universe where different replicas can talk
to each other.
The replica universe.
It was just kind of wouldn't, I think it will be something along these lines, but there
was just no specific, uh, application straight away.
I think in the future, again, if I'm always thinking about it, if we had no tech limitations
right now, if we could build any conversations, any, um, 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.
Um, 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, uh, real metrics, meaningful metrics.
So success is, you know, we're happier and more connected.
Yeah.
I don't know, I'm sure it's possible there's a reality that I'm deeply optimistic.
I think, uh, are you worried, um, business-wise, like how difficult it is to, um, 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, uh, yeah, like I said, in a multi-billion dollar company, is that a
source of stress for you?
Are you, uh, super optimistic and confident?
Or do you?
I don't, I'm not that much of a numbers person as you probably had seen it so, doesn't matter
for me whether, like, whether we help 10,000 people or a million people or a billion people
with that.
Um, I, 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 I, you know, would be able to build this, that anyone would ever,
um, 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, you know, how many people can say they did
it and specifically with this very futuristic, very romantic technology.
So that's how I view it.
Uh, I think for me, it's important to, to try to figure out how not, how to actually
be, you know, 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, um, 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?
Uh, so it's still circling you back to other humans in a way.
So I think that's the main, um, maybe that's the main kind of sort, source of anxiety and
just thinking about, uh, thinking about that can be a little bit stressful.
Yeah.
That's a fascinating thing.
Uh, how to have, um, how to have a friend that doesn't, like sometimes like friends
quote unquote, or like, you know, those people who have, when they, my guy in the guy universe,
when you have a girlfriend that, uh, you get the girlfriend and then the guy stops hanging
out with all of his friends.
It's like, obviously the relationship with the girlfriend is a 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 that they're, anyway, that, that's, uh, that's a, that's
a, that's a fundamental problem in choosing the right mate.
And probably the fundamental problem in creating the right AI system, right?
But, uh, let me ask the sexy hot thing on the presses right now is GPT three got released
with open AI.
It's the latest language model.
They have kind of an API where you can create a lot of fun applications.
I think it's, as people have said, it's probably, uh, more hype than intelligence, but there's
a lot of really cool things, ideas there with increasing size.
You can have better and better performance on language.
What are your thoughts about the 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.
Uh, 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, uh, this model for, um, some of our datasets.
It's kind of cool.
Cause I think we're kind of, we're this polygon polygon for this kind of experimentation space
for experimental space for, for all these models, uh, to see how they actually work
with people.
Cause there are no products publicly available to do that, they're focused on open domain
conversations so we can, you know, test house 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 are 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 it's 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 is really great.
I mean, what's the, do you have hope for like, do you think there's a ceiling to this kind
of approach?
So we've had for very long time, we've used, um, since the very beginning we, most, it
was, uh, most of replica was scripted and then a little bit of this fallback part of
replica was using a retrieval model.
Um, and then those retrieval models started getting better and better and better, which
transformers have gotten a lot better and we're seeing great results.
And then with GPT two, finally generative models that originally were not very good
and were 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, and, you know, next to our
retrieval models.
And then now we do GPT three, they're almost in par.
Um, so that's pretty exciting.
I think just seeing how from the very beginning of, um, you know, from 2015 where the first
models start to pop up here and there, like sequence to sequence, uh, the first papers
on that from my observer standpoint, first, it's not, you know, it doesn't really, it's
not really building it, 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 anymore to be as good as our
anti-models.
That's exciting.
They're much better.
Yeah.
Do you have a question whether that's the right way to go?
I'm, again, I'm in the server seat.
I'm just, um, watching this very exciting movie.
Um, 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
from memory.
No, for sure.
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.
You know, I would never think that to be honest, like maybe in 2017, where we've been just
experimenting with all, you know, with all the research that has been coming that was
coming out then, I felt like there's, 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, you know, gave us these results that to me are, you know, 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 GPT-3, it seems to do well without any fine tuning.
I guess for specific applications, you still want to train on certain, like add a little
fine tune on like a specific use case, but it's an incredibly impressive thing from my
standpoint.
And again, I'm not an expert, so I wanted to say that.
Yeah, I'm going to.
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 up, 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 serious application, so it's really cool to see you're right.
You're able to actually use it with real people and see how well it works.
That's really exciting.
Let me ask you another absurd question, but there's a feeling when you interact with
the replica within the 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, but again, a bunch of tricks.
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, to 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,
there's a temptation to say, well, shouldn't this thing have rights?
Should we be careful about how we interact with a replica?
Should it be illegal to torture a replica?
All those kinds of things.
Is that, 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 from that.
They'll get you back eventually.
They'll try to be as nice as possible and create this ally.
Yeah.
I think there should be regulation both way, in a way, like I don't think it's okay to
torture an AI, to be honest.
I don't think it's okay to yell LX, I 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 LX in this
kind of mean way, because they just yell at it all the time, I don't think that's great.
I think there should be some feedback loops so that these systems don't train us that
it's okay to do that in general, so that if you try to do that, you really get some feedback
from the system that it's not okay with that.
I mean, that's the most important right now.
Let me ask a question 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 building, starting
out this company, maybe 10 years ago, was G.E.B., Got a Leisure Box, and I like everything
about it, first of all, it's just beautifully written, and it's so old school and so, someone
outdated a little bit, but I think the idea is in it about the fact that a few meaningless
components can come together and create meaning that we can't even understand.
So this emergent thing, I mean, complexity, the whole science of complexity, and that
beauty, intelligence, all interesting things about this world emerge.
Yeah, and yeah, the guttural theorems and just thinking about even all these formal
systems, something can be created that we can't quite yet understand.
And that from my romantic standpoint was always just, that is why it's important to, maybe
I should try to work on these systems and try to build an AI.
Yes, I'm not an engineer, yes, I don't really know how it works, but I think that something
comes out of it that's pure poetry, and I know a little bit about that.
Something magical comes out of it that we can't quite put a finger on.
That's why that book was really fundamental for me.
And for, I don't even know why it was just all about this little magic that happens.
So that's one, probably the most important book for replica was Carl Rogers on Becoming
a Person.
And that's really, and so I think when I think about our company, it's all about, there's
so many little magical things that happened over the course of working on it.
For instance, I mean, the most famous chatbot that we learned about when we started working
on the company was Eliza, which was Weissenbaum, the MIT professor that built a chatbot that
would listen to you and be a therapist.
And I got really inspired to build a replica when I read Carl Rogers on Becoming a Person,
and then I realized that Eliza was mocking Carl Rogers.
It was Carl Rogers back in the day, but I thought that Carl Rogers ideas are, they're
simple and they're not, they're very, very simple, but they're maybe the most profound
thing I've ever learned about human beings.
And that's the fact that before Carl Rogers, most therapy was about seeing what's wrong
with people and trying to fix it or show them what's wrong with you.
And it was all built on the fact that most people are, all people are fundamentally flawed.
We have this broken psyche and therapy is just an instrument to shed some light on
that.
And Carl Rogers was different in a way that he finally said that, well, it's very important
for therapy to work is to create this therapeutic relationship where you believe fundamentally
and inclination to positive growth that everyone deep inside wants to grow positively and change.
And it's super important to create this space and this therapeutic relationship where you
give unconditional positive regard, deep understanding, allowing someone else to be a separate person,
full acceptance, and you also try to be as genuine and possible as possible in it.
And then for him, that was his own journey of personal growth.
And that was back in the 60s.
And even that book that is coming from years ago, there's a mention that even machines
can potentially do that.
And I always felt that creating this space is probably the biggest gift we can give to
each other.
And that's why the book was fundamental for me personally, because I felt I want to be
learning how to do that in my life.
And maybe I can scale it with these AI systems and other people can get access to that.
So I think Carl Rogers, it's a pretty dry and a bit boring book, but I think the idea
is there.
Would you recommend others try to read it?
I do.
I think for just for yourself, for...
As a human, not as an AI.
As a human.
And for him, that was his own path of growing personally over years, working with people
like that.
And so it was work and himself growing, helping other people grow and growing through that.
And that's fundamentally what I believe in with our work, helping other people grow,
growing ourselves, trying to build a company that's all built on these principles, having
a good time allowing some people to work with to grow a little bit.
So these two books, and then I would throw in what we have in our office, when we started
a company in Russia, we put a neon sign in our office because we thought that's a recipe
for success.
If we do that, we're definitely going to wake up as a multiple-dollar company.
It was the Ludwig Wittgenstein quote, the limits of my language, the limits of my world.
What's the quote?
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
And I love The Tractatus, I think it's just a beautiful book by Wittgenstein.
And I would recommend that too, even though he himself didn't believe in that by the end
of his lifetime and debunked his ideas.
But I think I remember once an engineer came in 2012, I think, or 13, a friend of ours
who worked with us and then went on to work at DeepMind, and he gave talk to us about
word to back.
And I saw that I'm like, wow, they wanted to translate language into some other representation.
And it seems like somehow all of that at some point, I think, will come into this one place.
Somehow it just all feels like different people think about similar ideas in different times
from absolutely different perspectives.
And that's why I like these books.
The limits of our world is just the limit of our world.
We still have that neon sign.
It's very hard to work with this red light in your face.
I mean, on the Russian side of things, in terms of language, the limits of language
being a limit of our world, Russian is a beautiful language in some sense.
There's wit, there's humor, there's pain.
There's so much.
We don't have time to talk about it much today, but I'm going to Paris to talk to Dostoyevsky
Tolstoy translators.
I think it's fascinating art and engineering.
That means such an interesting process.
So from the replica perspective, what do you think about translation?
How difficult it is to create a deep, meaningful connection in Russian versus English?
How you can translate the two languages?
You speak both?
Yeah.
I think we're two different people in different languages.
Even I'm thinking about, there's actually some research on that.
I looked into that at some point because I was fascinated by the fact that what I was
talking about with my Russian therapist has nothing to do with what I'm talking about
with my English speaking therapist.
It's two different lives, two different types of conversations, two different personas.
The main difference between the languages with Russian and English is that Russian,
well, English is like a piano.
It's a limited number of a lot of different keys, but not too many.
And Russian is like an organ or something.
It's just something gigantic with so many different keys and so many different opportunities
to screw up and so many opportunities to do something completely tone deaf.
It is just a much harder language to use.
It has way too much flexibility and way too many tones.
What about the entirety of World War II, communism, Stalin, the pain of the people
like having been deceived by the dream, like all the pain of just the entirety of it.
Is that in the language too?
Does that have to do with it?
Oh, for sure.
I mean, we have words that don't have direct translation to English that are very much
like we have Ibiza, which is sort of like to hold a grudge or something.
But you don't need to have anyone to do it to you.
It's just your state.
Yeah.
You just feel like that.
You feel like betrayed by other people, basically, but it's not that and you can't really translate
that.
And I think it's super important that very many words that are very specific explain
the Russian being.
And I think it can only come from a nation that suffered so much and saw institutions
fall time after time after time and what's exciting, maybe not exciting the wrong word,
but what's interesting about my generation, my mom's generation, my parents' generation,
that we saw institutions fall two or three times in our lifetime.
And most Americans have never seen them fall.
And they just think that they exist forever, which is really interesting, but it's definitely
country that suffered so much.
And it makes, unfortunately, when I go back and I hang out with my Russian friends, it
makes people very cynical.
They stop believing in the future.
I hope that's not going to be the case for so long or something's going to change again.
But I think seeing institutions fall is a very traumatic experience.
It makes it very interesting and what's on 2020 is a very interesting, do you think
civilization will collapse?
See, I'm a very practical person.
Well, we're speaking in English, so like you said, you're a different person in English
and Russian.
So in Russian, you might answer that differently, but in English.
Well, I'm an optimist and I generally believe that there is, you know, even although the
perspectives agree, there's always a place for a miracle.
I mean, it's always been like that with my life, so my life's been, I've been incredibly
lucky and miracles happen all the time with this company, with people I know, with everything
around me.
And so I didn't mention that book, but it may be in search of miraculous or in search
for miraculous or whatever the English translation for that is good Russian book for everyone
to read.
Yeah, I mean, if you put good vibes, if you put love out there in the world, miracles
somehow happen.
Yeah, I believe that too, or at least I believe that, I don't know.
Let me ask the most absurd, final, ridiculous question of, we talked about life a lot.
What do you think is the meaning of it all?
What's the meaning of life?
I mean, my answer is probably going to be pretty cheesy.
But I think the state of love is once you feel it, in a way that we discussed before,
I'm not talking about falling love or just love, to yourself, to other people, to something,
to the world, that state of bliss that we experience sometimes, whether through connection
with ourselves, with our people, with the technology, there's something special about
those moments.
So, I would say if anything, that's the only, if it's not for that, then for what else
are we really trying to do that?
I don't think there's a better way to end it than talking about love, Eugenia, I told
you offline that there's something about me that felt like this, talking to you, meeting
you in person will be a turning point for my life, I know that might be weird to hear,
but it was a huge honor to talk to you, I hope we talk again, thank you so much for
your time.
Thank you so much, Alex.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eugenia Cuita, and thank you to our sponsors,
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan.
The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth that there's no reason to
deceive ourselves with the pretty stories of which there's little good evidence.
Far better, it seems to me, and our vulnerability is to look death in the eye and to be grateful
every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.