Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
eugenia cuida co-founder of replica
which is an app that allows you to make
friends with an artificial intelligence
system a chatbot that learns to connect
with you on an emotional you can even
say a human level by being a friend
for those of you who know my interest in
ai and views on life in general
know that replica and eugenia's line of
work is near and dear to my heart
the origin story of replica is grounded
in a personal tragedy of eugenia losing
her close friend roman 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 training a chatbot neural net on text
messages between eugenia and roman
the rest is a beautiful human story as
we talk about with eugenia
when a friend mentioned eugenia's work
to me i knew i had to meet her and talk
to her i felt before during and after
that this meeting would be an important
one in my life
and it was
i think in ways that only time will
truly show to me and others
she's a kind and brilliant person it was
an honor and a pleasure to talk to her
quick summary of the sponsors doordash
dollar shave club and cash app
click the sponsor links in the
description to get a discount and to
support this podcast
as a side note let me say that deep
meaningful connection between human
beings and artificial intelligence
systems is a lifelong passion for me
i'm not yet sure where that passion will
take me but
i decided some time ago that i will
follow it boldly and without fear
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 enjoyed this thing subscribe on
youtube review it with five stars on
apple podcast follow on spotify support
on patreon or connect with me on twitter
at lex friedman
as usual i'll do a few minutes of ads
now and no ads in the middle i'll try to
make these interesting but give you
timestamps so you can skip but please do
still check out the sponsors by clicking
the links in the description to get a
discount buy whatever they're selling it
really is the best way to support this
podcast
this show is sponsored by dollar shave
club try them out with a one-time offer
for only five bucks and free shipping at
dollarshave.com
lex
the starter kit comes with a six blade
razor refills and all kinds of other
stuff that makes shaving feel great
i've been a member of dollar shave club
for over five years and actually signed
up when i first heard about them on the
joe rogan experience podcast and now
friends we have come full circle
it feels like i made it now that i can
do a read for them just like joe did all
those years ago
back when he also did ads
for some less reputable companies
let's say
you know about if you're a true fan of
the old school podcasting world
anyway i just used the razer and the
refills but they told me i should really
try out the shave butter i did
i love it it's translucent somehow which
is a cool new experience
again try the ultimate shave starter set
today for just five bucks plus free
shipping at dollarshaveclub.com
lex
this show is also sponsored by doordash
get five dollars off as your delivery
fee is in your first order of 15 bucks
or more when you download the doordash
app and enter code you guessed it
i have so many memories of working late
nights for a deadline with a team of
engineers whether that's for my phd at
google or mit and eventually taking a
break to argue about which door dash
restaurant to order from and when the
food came those moments of bonding of
exchanging ideas of pausing to shift
attention from the programs the humans
were special
for a bit of time i'm on my own now so i
missed that camaraderie but
actually i still use doordash a lot
there's a million options that fit into
my crazy keto diet ways
also it's a great way to support
restaurants in these challenging times
once again download the doordash app and
enter code lex to get five bucks off
it's your delivery fees and your first
order of fifteen dollars or more
finally this shows presented by cash app
the number one finance app in the app
store i can truly say that they're an
amazing company
one of the first sponsors if not the
first sponsor to truly believe in me
and
and i think quite possibly the reason
i'm still doing this podcast so
i'm forever grateful to cash app
so thank you and as i said many times
before use code lex podcast when you
download the app from google play or the
app store
cash app lets you send money to friends
buy bitcoin invest in the stock market
with as little as one dollar
i usually say other stuff here in the
read but i wasted all that time up front
saying how grateful i am to cash out i'm
going to try to go off the top of my
head a little bit more for these reads
because i'm actually very lucky to be
able to choose the sponsors that we take
on and that means i can really only take
on the sponsors that i truly love and
then i can just talk about why i love
them so it's pretty simple
again get cash app from the app store
google play use code lex podcast get 10
bucks and cash app will also donate 10
bucks to first an organization that is
helping to advance robotics and stem
education for young people around the
world
and now here's my conversation with
eugenia cuida
okay before we talk about ai and the
amazing work you're doing let me ask you
ridiculously we're both russian so let
me ask you a ridiculously romanticized
russian question do you think human
beings are
alone
like fundamentally on a philosophical
level
like in our
existence when we
like go through life
do you think um
just the nature of our
life is loneliness
yeah so we have to read dostoevsky at
school as you probably know
yeah
i mean it's part of the your school
program
um 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 um you know
but i view my whole life as trying to
get away from that
trying to not feel uh feel lonely and
again we're talking about you know
subjective kind of way of feeling
alone it doesn't necessarily mean that
you don't have any connections or you're
actually isolated
you think it's a subjective
thing but like
again another absurd measurement-wise
thing how much loneliness do you think
there is in the world
so like
if you see loneliness as a
as a condition
how much of it is there
do you think like how i guess how many
you know there's all kinds of studies
and measures of
how much you know how many people in the
world feel alone there's all these like
measures of how many people are
you know self-report or just all these
kinds of different measures but in your
own perspective
um
how big of a problem do you think it is
size-wise
well i'm actually fascinated by the
topic of loneliness i try to read about
it as much as i can
um
what really
and there 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 it's
actually proven and pretty
you know tons of papers tons of research
around that it has proven um
that it's correlated with earlier um
life expectancy shorter life span
and it is you know in a way like right
now what scientists would say that it
you know it's a little bit worse than
being obese so not actually doing any
physical activity in your life the
impact on your interests have impact on
your physiological health yeah so it's
basically puts you if you're constantly
feeling lonely
um your body responds like it's
basically all the time under stress so
it's always in this alert
um alerts say
and so it's really bad for you because
it actually like drops your immune
system and get it your response to
inflammation
is quite different so
all the cardiovascular vascular diseases
actually responds to viruses so it's
much easier to catch a virus
that's sad now that we're living in a
pandemic
and it's probably making us a lot more
alone and it's probably weakening the
immune system making us more susceptible
to the virus
it's kind of
sad
yeah the statistics are the sticks are
pretty pretty horrible around that so
around thirty percent
of all millennials report that they're
feeling lonely constantly thirty thirty
percent and then it's much worse for jan
z and then twenty percent of millennials
say that they feel lonely
and they also don't have any close
friends and then um i think 25 or so and
then 20 percent would say they don't
even have acquaintances
this is the united states that's in the
united states
and i'm pretty sure that that's much
worse everywhere else like in the uk i
mean it was white
widely like tweeted and
uh posted when they were talking about a
minister of loneliness that they wanted
to appoint because four out of ten you
people in uk feel lonely
so i think we don't understand
i mean that i think that thing actually
exists
um so yeah you you you will die sooner
if you if you are lonely and again that
this is only when we're only talking
about your perception of loneliness of
feeling lonely that is not objectively
fully so being fully socially isolated
however the combination of being fully
socially isolated and not having many
connections
and also feeling lonely that's pretty
much a deadly
combination
so it strikes me bizarre or strange that
this is a wide known fact and then
there's really
no one
working really on that because it's a
subclinical it's not clinical it's not
something that you can we'll 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
uh i mean
or basically not just the humans but the
technology that connects us humans do
you think there's a hope for that
technology
to do the connection
like are you on social media much
unfortunately
do you find yourself
like
again if you sort of introspect about
how connected you feel to other human
beings how not alone you feel do you
think social media makes it better or
worse
maybe for you personally or in in
general
i think it's it's easier to look at some
stats and um i mean gen z's seem to be
generation z seems to be much lonelier
than millennials in terms of however
they report loneliness they're
definitely the most connected
you know generation in the world i mean
i still remember life without without an
iphone without facebook they don't know
that that ever existed
uh or at least don't know how it was
um so that tells me a little bit about
the fact that that might be um
you know this hyperconnected world is
might actually make people feel lonely
lonelier
i don't know exactly what the what the
measurements are around that but i would
say in my personal experience i think it
does make you feel a lot lonelier mostly
yeah we're all super connected but i
think loneliness the feeling of
loneliness doesn't come from
not having any social connections
whatsoever again tons of people that are
in
long-term relationships experienced
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 then this feeling
actually starts to go away a little bit
and then you
um open up
yourself to actually meeting other
people in a very special way uh 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
downline of some of your work
do you think that's um
engineering-wise a possibility to
alleviate loneliness
is not with another human but with an ai
system
well i know that's that's a fact
that's what we're doing and we see it
and we measure that and we see how
people start to feel less lonely
talking to
their virtual ai friend so basically a
chatbot at the basic level but could be
more
like do you have i'm not even speaking
sort of uh
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 um let me let me
first start like right now the way
people perceive ai which is recommender
systems for facebook and twitter social
media they see 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 just have ai systems
floating about that like make our life
less lonely
yeah make us happy
make like our
putting good things into the world in
terms of our individual lives
yeah totally believe it and that that's
why we're i'm also working on that
um
i think we need to also make sure that
um 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
our all of our business models are
optimized for that because you can talk
you know a lot of products that talk
about
um 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
um so i think it's really important to
put your measure yep to measure it
what's uh what's a good measurement of
loneliness
well so that's something that i'm really
interested in how do you measure that
people are feeling better
or that they're feeling less lonely with
lowliness 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 uh does
it capture the momentary
feeling of loneliness does it look in
like
the past month like uh
is it basically a self-report does it
try to sneak up on you
it's very tricky to answer honestly or
something like that
well what's yeah i'm not familiar with
the question it is just asking you a few
questions like how often did you feel
like lonely or how often did you feel
connected to other people in this last
few
couple weeks um
it's similar to the self-report
questionnaires for depression and
anxiety like phq9 and get seven
of course any as any self-report
questionnaires that's not necessarily
very precise so very
well measured but still if you take a
big enough population you
get them through these
uh questionnaires you can see you can
see the positive dynamic and so you
basically uh you put people through
questionnaires to see like
is this thing is our is what we're
creating making people happier
yeah we measure so we measure two
outcomes one short term right after the
conversation we asked people whether
this conversation made them feel better
worse or same
um
this this metric right now is at eighty
percent so eighty percent of all our
conversations make people feel better
but i should have done the questionnaire
with you
you feel a lot worse after we've done
this conversation
that's actually fascinating i should
probably do that
but that's that's sorry
you should totally and aim for 80
aim to outperform
your current state-of-the-art ai system
uh in these human conversations so again
we'll get to
your work with replica but let me
continue on the line of absurd questions
so you it talks about um you know deep
connection with the humans deep
connection with the ai meaningful
connection
let me ask about love people make fun of
me because i talk about love all the
time but uh what
what do you think a love is
like maybe in the context of um a
meaningful connection with somebody else
do you draw a distinction between
love
like friendship
and facebook friends
[Laughter]
or is it a graduate no
is it it's all the same
no like is it just a gradual thing or is
there something fundamental about us
humans that seek
like a really deep connection
uh
with another human being and what is
that
what is love
eugenia
um well the way i see it um
specifically um the way it relates to
our work and the way it was
the way it inspired
our work on replica
um
i think one of the
biggest and the most precious gifts we
can give to each other
now in 2020 as humans is this
gift of deep empathetic understanding
the feeling of being deeply seen
like what does that mean like that
you exist like somebody acknowledging
the
somebody
seeing you for who you actually are and
that's extremely extremely rare i think
that is
that combined with unconditional
positive regard
belief and
trust that
you internally are always inclined for
positive growth and believing you in
this way
letting you be
a separate person at the same time
and this deep empathetic understanding
for me that's the
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 um
when we see that someone's
accepts us so deeply we start to accept
ourselves and
the paradoxes that's when
big changes start start happening big
fundamental changes and people start
happening so i think that is the
ultimate therapeutic relationship that
is and that might be
in some way definition of love
so so
acknowledging that there's a separate
person and accepting you for who you are
now
on a slightly
so that and you mentioned therapeutic
that sounds very like a very healthy
view of love but uh is there also like
uh
like
you know if we look at heartbreak and uh
you know most love songs are probably
about heartbreak right
is that like the mystery the tension the
danger the fear of loss
you know
all of that what people might see in a
negative light as like games or whatever
but just
just the the dance of human interaction
yeah fear of loss
and fear of like
you said like once you feel it once you
long for it again
but you also once you feel it once you
might for many people they've lost it
so they fear losing it they feel lost so
is that part of it
like you're you're speaking like
beautifully about like the positive
things but is it important to be able to
uh
be afraid of losing it
from an engineering perspective
i mean it's a huge part of it and
unfortunately we all
you know
face it at some points in our lives i
mean i did you want to go into details
how did you get your heart broken
sure
well so mine is pretty straight my
source pretty straightforward um
there
i did have a friend that was you know
that at some point um in my 20s
became really really close to me and we
we became really close friends
um i grew up pretty lonely so in many
ways when i'm building you know this
these ai friends i think about myself
when i was 17 writing horrible poetry
and you know in my dial-up modem at home
and
um
you know and
that was the feeling that i grew up with
i left i lived um alone for a long time
when i was a teenager where did you grow
up in moscow and then outskirts of
moscow
um so i just skateboard during the day
and come back home and you know connect
to the internet and write pokemon and
then write horrible poetry and was it
love poems
all sorts of points obviously love poems
i mean what what other poetry can you
write when you're 17.
it could be political or something but
yeah
but that was you know that was kind of
my yeah like deeply
um influenced by joseph brodsky and like
all sorts of spots that um
every 17 year old will will be looking
you know looking at and reading
but yeah that was my uh these were my
teenage years and i just never had a
person that i thought would you know
take me as it is would accept me the way
i am
um
and i just thought you know working and
just doing my thing and being angry at
the world and being a reporter i was an
investigative reporter working
undercover and writing about people was
my way to connect with
you know with with others i i was deeply
curious about every
everyone else and i thought that you
know 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 alone seeking
connection
[Laughter]
i'm just kidding or am i i don't know
so what wait a reporter uh
what
how did that make you feel more
connected i mean you're
still fundamentally pretty alone
but you're always with other people you
know you're always thinking about what
other
place gonna infiltrate what other
community can i write about what other
phenomena can i explore and he's sort of
like a trickster you know and like
and a mythological character like
creature that's just jumping uh between
all sorts of different worlds and feel
and feel sort of okay with
in all of them so
um that was my dream job by the way that
was like totally what i would have been
doing
um
if russia was a different place
and a little bit undercover so like you
weren't you were trying to like you said
mythological creature trying to
infiltrate so try to be a part of the
world what are we talking about what
kind of things did you enjoy writing
about
i'd go work at a strip club or go
awesome
okay uh well i'd go work at a restaurant
or just go write about you know um
certain phenomenons or phenomenons of
people in in the city
and what uh sorry to keep interrupting
i'm the worst
a conversationalist what
stage of russia is this what uh is this
pre-putin
post-putin
what was russia like
pre-putin is really long ago
uh this is putin era that's uh beginning
of 2000's and 2010 2007 8 9 10. what
were strip clubs like in russia and
restaurants and
culture and
people's minds like in that early russia
that you were covering in those early
2000s was there was still a lot of hope
there was still tons of hope that
um
you know we're
sort of becoming this uh
western
westernized society
the restaurants were opening we were
really looking
and you know um
we're trying we're trying to copy a lot
of things from
uh from the us from europe uh bringing
all these things and very enthusiastic
about that so there's a lot of you know
stuff going on there's a lot of hope and
dream for this you know new moscow that
would be
similar to i guess new york i mean just
to give you an idea and
um year 2000 was the year one we had two
uh movie theaters in moscow and there
was this one first coffee house that
opened
and it was like really big deal by 2010
there were all sorts of things
everywhere almost like a chain like a
starbucks type of coffee house or like
you mean
oh yeah like a starbucks i mean i
remember we were reporting on like we
were writing about the opening of
starbucks i think in 2007 that was one
of the biggest things that happened and
you know in moscow back back in the time
like that was worthy of a magazine cover
and
uh that was definitely the you know the
biggest talk of the time yeah when was
mcdonald's because i was still in russia
when mcdonald's opened that was in the
90s i mean yeah i remember that very
well
yeah those were long long lines i think
it was 1990 three or four i don't
remember
um
mcdonald's at that time did you do that
i mean that was a luxurious outing that
was definitely not something you do
every day and also the line was at least
three hours so if you're going to
mcdonald's that is not fast food that is
like at least three hours in line yeah
and then no one is trying to eat fast
after that everyone is like trying to
enjoy as much as possible
what's your memory of that
oh it was
insane
extremely positive it's a small
strawberry milkshake and a hamburger and
small fries and my mom's there and
sometimes i'll just because i was really
little they'll just let me run you know
up the cashier and like
cut the line which is
like you cannot really do that in russia
or
so like for a lot of people
like a lot of those experiences might
seem
not very fulfilling
you know like it's
on the verge of poverty i suppose
but
do you remember all that time fondly
like
because i do like the first time i drink
you know coke
you know all that stuff right
um
and just
yeah the connection with other human
beings in russia i remember i remember
really positively
like how do you remember what the 90s
and then the rush you were covering just
the human connections you had with
people
and the experiences
well my my parents were both both
physicists my grandparents were both
well my
grandpa grandfather was an
um
nuclear physicist
a professor at the university my dad
worked at chernobyl when i was born
in chernobyl
analyzing kind of the
everything after the explosion and then
i remember 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 uh the dean and the
university
and i remember my grandfather started
making a hundred dollars a month
after
you know in the 90s so then i remember
we started our main line of work would
be to go to our
little tiny country house
get a lot of apples there from apple
trees
bring them back to
to
to the city and sell them
in the street so me and my
nuclear physicist grandfather were just
standing there and he 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
um
you know something
about planets and whatever the particles
and stuff and
you know i'm not smart at all so i could
never understand anything but i was
interested as a you know journalist kind
of type interested but that was my
memory and you know i'm happy that i
wasn't um
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 i 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 um
restaurant like a government half
government owned something restaurant so
they always had um supplies so he
exchanged a big bag of weed
for this nintendo
that looked like nintendo
and then i remember very fondly because
i think it was nine or
something like that and or seven
traumatic
because we just got it and i was playing
it and there was this you know dandy tv
show yeah um so dramatically positive
sense you mean like like a definitive
well they took it away and gave me a bag
of wheat instead and i cried like my
eyes out for days
days and days oh no
and then you know as a
and my dad said we're gonna 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 my nintendo
that was extremely traumatic um 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
uh 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 uh still
that was still alive for
this last few years i think he died a
few years ago now
my dad somehow luckily got back earlier
than everyone else
but just the fact that that was the and
i was always like well how did they send
you i was only i was just born you know
you had a newborn talk about paternity
leave they're like but that's who they
took because they didn't know whether
you would be able to have kids when you
come back
so they took the ones with kids
so him with some guys want 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
um
his 21st
birthday at the reactor
you like work three hours a day you
sleep the rest and and i yeah so i
played with a lot of toys from chernobyl
what are your memories of chernobyl in
in general like
a bigger context you know because of
that hbo show
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've 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've screwed things up
like what are your thoughts about that
time
personal and
in general
i mean i was born when the explosion
happened so
actually a few months after so of course
i don't remember anything apart from the
fact that my dad would bring me tiny
toys plus
like plastic things that would just go
crazy haywire when you you know put the
gagger
my mom was like just
nuclear about that
um
i was like what are you bringing you
should not do that uh she was nuclear
very nice absolutely well done
well uh
but yeah but the tv show was just
phenomenal i mean
yeah it's definitely
first of all it's an incredible how um
that was made not by the russians but
someone else but capturing so well
everything about the
you know about our country
um it felt a lot more genuine that most
of the movies and tv shows are made now
in russia just so much more genuine and
most of my friends in russia were just
in complete awe about the
with the show but i think that how good
of a job they did oh my god phenomenal
but all the apartments there's something
yeah the set design i mean russians
can't do that we you know but you you
see everything and it's like wow that's
exactly how it was
it's so i 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 his history
no he did like super bad or some like or
like uh
i don't know yeah like exactly whatever
that thing about the bachelor party in
vegas uh
number four and five or something were
the ones that he worked yeah
but so he
made me feel really sad for some reason
that
if
a person obviously a genius could go in
and just study
and just be
extreme attention to detail that can do
a good job it made me think like
why don't
other people do a good job with this
like about russia like there's so little
about russia there's so few good films
about
the russian side of world war ii
of 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 you
know 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
um just capturing all the problems that
exist now with the country and like um
focusing on the right things like if you
build the whole country on a lie
that's what's gonna 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
i think experience
he never talks
he's this kind of russian man that just
my husband who's american and he asked
him a few times like 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
like
that's what you do
you cannot say no
yeah
it's just
it's like a russian way it's the
russians don't talk that much no there
are downsides and upsets for that
uh 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 uh
do um to be a journalist
in that time what was what was russia
like at that time post
he 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 a
country like those with you know
um 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 i you know coming
out of it after the movie and the guy
that i saw on the stairs was like
playing their 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
tons of violence tons of uh you know
just basically mafia mobs on
in the streets and then the 2000s were
like you know things just got cleaned up
uh oil went up uh 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 um the money kept
jumping back and forth like first there
were millions of rebels then it got like
default you know then it got to like
thousands there was one rubble with
something then again to millions
it was like crazy town that was crazy um
and then the 2000s were just these years
of
stability in a way and um
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 in
facebook to look in at other cities in
europe and new york and
us and
trying to do the same in our like small
kind of cities towns there what was uh
what were your thoughts of putin at the
time
well in the beginning he was really
positive everyone was very
you know positive about putin he was
young
um he's very energetic he also
intermediate
the sheriff was somewhat compared to
well that was not like way before the
shirtless era
um the shirtless era
okay so it didn't start off shortly when
did the shirtless era that'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 that's the
shirtless putin now 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
yeah the presidency the second term for
the pro um of the presidency but
elsinore was not feeling great you know
in the
by the end of his second term uh he was
you know
alcoholic he was really old
he was falling off
uh
you know the stages when he was talking
uh so people were looking for it fresh i
think for a fresh face for someone who's
gonna continue yeltsin's
uh work but who's going to be a lot more
energetic and a lot more
active young
um efficient maybe
so that's what we all saw in putin back
in the day i i'd say that everyone
absolutely everyone in russia in early
2000s who was not a communist would be
yeah putin's great we have a lot of
hopes for him what are your thoughts and
i promise we'll get back
to uh first of all
your love story 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 my grandparents who lived
through that it was horrible it was just
plain horrible
it was just awful um you think it's
there's something i mean it sounds
nice on paper
there's uh
so like the drawbacks of capitalism is
that uh
you know eventually there is it's a it's
the point of like a slippery slope
eventually it creates uh
you know the rich get richer
it creates a disparity like inequality
of um
wealth inequality
if like you know
i guess it's hypothetical at this point
but
eventually capitalism leads to humongous
inequality and that 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 of communism or this sort
of marxism is uh
is is not allowing that kind of slippery
slope
but then you see the actual
implementations of it and still 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 we look
at chernobyl
you know those kinds of barack
bureaucracies that were constructed
is there something like do you think
about this much
of like why it 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 uh there's already this dream of
equal life so
then i guess the
the situation that we hadn't you know
the russia and soviet in the soviet
union it was more it's a bunch of 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
yeah this constant state of fear
you didn't own any own anything you
didn't you know the
you couldn't go travel you couldn't read
anything
western or you could make a career
really unless you're working 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 because this they 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
so that was very important that was the
main investment
um but was miserable it was so 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 and 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
i mean what was your like
favorite food
what was like whoa like this is possible
oh fruit because we only had apples
bananas
and whatever and you know whatever
watermelons whatever
you know people would
grow in the soviet union so there were
no
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
um 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 uh or like addictions or so on
but i think i've developed an unhealthy
relationship with fruit
and 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 all kinds of like different types
of peaches
like cherries were killer for me i know
i know you say like we had bananas and
so on but
i don't remember having the kind of
banana like when i first came to this
country the amount of banana i like
literally got fat on bananas
like the amount oh yeah for sure
delicious and like cherries the kind
like just the quality of the food
i was like this is capitalism this is
that's pretty good it's delicious
yeah yeah
yeah it's funny
it's funny
yeah like it's it's funny to read
i don't know what to think of it
of um
it's funny to think how an idea
that's just written on paper
when carried out amongst millions of
people how that gets actually
when it becomes reality what it actually
looks like
uh
sorry but the
been studying hitler a lot recently
and uh going through mineconf
he uh pretty much rode out of minecon
for everything he was gonna do
unfortunately most leaders including
stalin didn't read the 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
i think people don't study enough now
i know 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 the beauty and the terror
of russian history
through this stupid podcast
by talking to a few people
so anyway i just feel like so much was
forgotten i so much was forgotten i'll
probably i'm gonna try to convince
myself to um you're a super busy and
super important person well i'm gonna i
want 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 a
russian sherpa
yeah
but
love
you were you're talking about your early
days of uh
being a little bit alone and
finding a connection with the world
through being a journalist
where does 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're 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 it's one day and you know in
summer that we just stayed out um
outdoor the whole night and just talked
and
for some unknown reason i 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 raining it was
beautiful
you know sunrise and
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
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 you mean like on many
different levels power because you could
be yourself
at least you know that some somewhere
you can't be
just yourself like you don't need to
pretend you don't need to be
you know
great at work or tell some story or sell
yourself in some way or another
and so we became this 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 it felt really cool i
didn't know what i'm gonna what i would
uh really do but i felt like i kind of
need a startup
okay so that's so that pulled you in
to the startup world
yeah
and then
yeah and then this uh 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 hannah you know next to the
river
um and died the same damage
[Music]
so
and you've moved to america
at that point at that point i was like
what about him what about roman him too
he actually moved first so i was always
sort of trying to do what he was doing
so
i didn't like that he was already here
and i was still you know in moscow and
we weren't hanging out together all the
time so was he in san francisco yeah we
were roommates
so he just visited moscow
for we went back for for our visas we
had to get a stamp and our passport
for our work visas and
the embassy was taking a little longer
so we stayed there for a couple weeks
what happened how did you
so 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
i just ran 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 still felt like
the whole life is
you know
you could still dream about ridiculous
things different
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 he
talked about
the feeling of love having power what is
the feeling of loss
if you like
well in buddhism there's this concept of
samaya where
something really
like huge happens and then you can see
very clearly
um i think that was it like basically
something changed so
changed me so much in such a short
period of time that i could just see
really
really clearly what mattered or what not
well i definitely
saw that whatever i was doing at work
didn't matter at all
and some other 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 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 it's
on 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 toy with like played with
the wrong a bunch of ideas but
the last one he had was around um
building a startup around death
so
having um 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 symmetries uh more biologically
like things that could be better
biologically for for humans and
at this end um at the same time having
those um digital avatars these kind of
ai avatars that would store all the
memory about a person that he could
interact with what year was this 2015.
well right before that his death so it
was like a couple months before that he
recorded that video
and so i found out my computer when um
it was in our living room
he never got in but um he was thinking
about a lot somehow
does it have the digital avatar idea
yeah
that's so interesting well he just says
well that's in his yeah the fish has
this idea and he'll he talks about like
i want to rethink how people grieve and
how people talk about death why was he
interested in this and i
is it
maybe someone who's depressed
yeah is like naturally inclined thinking
about that
but i just felt you know this year in
san francisco we just had so much um
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 um
i don't know i just felt like i was
taking care of
off him a lot and
he almost started 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
our help you know helped organize the
funeral help 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 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
um
yeah it was definitely very
very tough tough time
do you think about your
own mortality
you said uh
you know
we're young the the the the possibility
of doing all kinds of crazy things it's
still out there it's still
before us but uh it can end any moment
do you think about your own
ending
at any moment
unfortunately i think about way too
way too much
it's somehow after roman like every year
after that i started losing people that
i really love i lost my grandfather next
year
my
you know the
the person who would explain to me you
know what the universe is made off
while you're selling apples
while selling apples and then i lost
another close friend of mine and
um
and it just made me very scared i have
tons of fear about death that's what
makes me
not fall asleep oftentimes and just go
in loops and
um
and then as my therapist you know
recommended me i open up uh some
nice calming images
with the voice over and it calms me down
oh for sleep
yeah i'm really scared of that this is a
big
i definitely have tons of
i guess some pretty big trauma about it
and i'm still working through
there's a philosopher
ernest becker who wrote a book um denial
of death i'm not sure if you're familiar
with any of those folks
um there's a in psychology a whole field
called
terror management theory
sheldon
was just on the podcast he wrote the
book he was the
we talked for four hours about death
uh
fear of death uh but his whole idea is
that
ernest becker i think i i find this idea
really compelling
is uh that
everything human beings have created
like our whole motivation in life
is to uh create
like escape death
is to try to uh
construct an illusion
of um
that we're somehow immortal it's like
everything around us
this room
your startup
your dreams
all everything you do
is a kind of um
creation
of a brain
unlike any other mammal or species is
able to be cognizant of the fact that it
ends for us
i think so you know there's there's the
question of like the meaning of life
that
you know you look at like what drives us
uh humans and when i read ernest becker
that i highly recommend people read
is the first time i
this scene it felt like this is the
right
thing at the core
uh sheldon's work is called warm at the
core
so he's saying it's i think it's uh
william james he's quoting or whoever
is like the the thing
what is it the core of it all sure
there's like love
you know jesus might talk about like
love is at the core of everything i i
don't you know that's the open question
what's that the
you know it's turtles turtles but it
can't be turtles all the way down what's
what's at the at the bottom and uh
ernest becker says the fear of death and
the way
in fact
uh because you said therapist and
calming images his whole idea is um
you know we we want to bring that fear
of death as close as possible
to the surface
because it's uh
and like meditate on that
uh and and use the clarity of vision
that provides to uh
you know to live a more fulfilling life
to um 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 um
in the most fulfilling life
so that's the that's the duel 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 i've
i'm again i talk about way too much
about love and probably death
and when i ask people
or 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
um
they're afraid
you know it's kind of almost like they
see death as this kind of like
a paper deadline or something and
they're afraid not to finish the paper
before the paper like like i'm afraid
not to finish um
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 uh the very thing that
you know
um
like when you think deeply about
something you can dis you can realize
that you haven't actually
thought about it
uh yeah and i and when i think about
death it's like uh
it can be
it's terrifying if it feels like
stepping outside into the cold
or it's freezing and then i have to like
hurry back inside or it's warm
uh
but like i think there's something
valuable about stepping out there into
the freezing cold uh definitely
when i talk to my mentor about it he
always
uh tells me
well what dies
there's nothing there that can die
but i guess that
works um
well in in buddhism one of the concepts
are really hard to
grasp and that people spend all their
lives meditating on would be
anata which is the concept of non not
self
and kind of thinking that you know if
you're not your thoughts which are
obviously not your thoughts because you
can observe them and not your emotions
and not your body
then what is this and if you go really
far then finally you see that
there's not self there's this concept of
not self so
once you get there
how can that actually die what is dying
right you're just a bunch of molecules
stardust
but that is very um you know very
advanced um spiritual work for me
i'm definitely just
definitely not
oh my god no i have uh
i think it's very very useful it's just
the fact that maybe being so afraid is
not useful and mine is more i'm just
terrified like it's really makes me
um on a personal level on a personal
level
i'm terrified
how do you overcome that
i don't
i'm still trying to
have pleasant images
well pleasant images get me uh 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
[Laughter]
is there other
like is there moments
since you've uh lost roman that you had
like moments of
like bliss and like that you've
forgotten
that you have achieved that buddhist
like level of
like
what can possibly die i'm part like uh
losing yourself in the moment
in the
ticking
time of like
this universe he's just part of it
for a brief moment and just enjoying it
well that goes hand in hand i remember
i think a day or two after he died we
went to
finally get his passport out of the
embassy and
we're driving around moscow and it was
you know december which is usually
there's never sun in moscow in december
and somehow it was an extremely sunny
day and we were driving with
um close friend
um
and i remember feeling for the first
time maybe this just moment of um
incredible clarity and somehow happiness
not like
happy happiness
but happiness and just feeling that you
know
um
i know what the universe is sort of
about whether it's good or bad um and it
wasn't a sad feeling it was probably the
most beautiful feeling that you can ever
um
achieve
and you can only get it when something
oftentimes when something traumatic like
that happens um but also if you just you
really spend a lot of time meditating
looking at the nature doing something
that really gets you there
but once you're there i think when you
uh summit a mountain a really hard
mountain you you inevitably get there
that's just a way to get to the state
but once you're on this in this state um
you can do really big things i think
yeah
sucks it doesn't last forever so
bukowski talked about like
love is the fog
like
it's uh when you wake up in the morning
it's it's there but it eventually
dissipates
it's really sad nothing lasts forever
but 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
with tears in my eyes is interesting and
then that like complete like
uh 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
that's beautiful
i like that
but definitely pushing yourself
physically one of it for sure yeah it's
yeah
like you said i mean you were speaking
as a metaphor of mount everest but it
also works like literally i think
physical endeavor somehow
yeah there's something i mean war
monkeys
apes whatever
physical there's a physical thing to it
but there's something to this
pushing yourself physical physically but
alone that happens when you're doing
like things like you do or strenuous
like workouts or
you know rolling across the atlantic or
yeah like marathons that's why i love
watching marathons and
you know 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 uh
he basically
uh so he's been either email on the
phone with me every day through this so
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
advice like
he has um through everything i've been
doing he's been doubling everything i do
so he he's insane
uh he's a this navy seal person
uh 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 a
number of pull-ups he's just does
everything where's like
he
like how can i suffer today he figures
that out and does it
yeah that um
whatever that is uh that process of
self-discovery is really important i
actually had to turn myself off from the
internet mostly because i started this
like workout thing like a happy
go-getter
with my like headband and like
like
just like uh because a lot of people
were like inspired and they're like yeah
we're gonna exercise with you
and i was yeah great you know but then
like
i realized that this this journey can't
be done
together with others
this has to be done alone
so
out of the moment of love out of the
moments of loss
can we uh 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
years to
um
just see if i can maybe switch gears and
do something else 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
um and we worked on a bank
the idea was to build a
bank on top of a telco
so that was 2011 or 12
and a lot of telecommunication company
um 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 um
you put a bank on top and then all work
works out basically your prepaid account
becomes your bank account and um you can
use it as as your bank
uh so
you know a third of a country wakes up
as your bank client
um but we couldn't quite figure out what
would be the main interface to interact
with the bank the problem was that most
people didn't have smart smartphones
back in the time uh in russia the
penetration of smartphones was low
um people didn't use mobile banking or
online banking on their computers
so we figured out that sms would be the
best way uh because that would work on
feature phones uh wow but that required
some chatbot technology
which i didn't know anything about um
obviously
so i started looking into it and saw
that there's nothing really well there
was just nothing there was ideas through
sms be able to interact with your bank
account
yeah and then we thought well cool since
you're talking to a bank account why
can't this can't we use more of you know
some behavioral ideas and why can't this
banking chatbot be nice to you and
really talk to you sort as a friend this
way you develop more connection to it
retention is higher people don't turn
and so i went to very depressing
uh russian cities to test it out
um i went to i remember three different
towns with uh
um to interview potential users um so
people use it for a little bit cool
and i want to talk to them um poor towns
very poor towns mostly towns that were
um
you know sort of factories
uh mono towns they were building
something and then the factory went away
and it was just a bunch of
very poor people um
and then we went to a couple that
weren't as dramatic but still the one i
remember really fondly was this woman
that worked at a glass factory and she
talked to chatbot um
and she was talking about it and started
crying during the interview because she
said no one really cares for me that
much
and um
so to be clear that was the my only
endeavor in programming that chat boss
it was really simple it was literally
just a few
if this then that rules and
um
it was incredibly simplistic
and still that made her and that really
made her emotional she said you know i
have my mom and my um 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 a moment was like
well
it's not that the technology is ready
because
definitely in 2012 technology was not
ready for
for that but um
humans already unfortunately so this
project would not be about like tech
capabilities would be more about
human vulnerabilities but um there's
something so so powerful around
about conversational
um 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 solved the
banking project um
but my then boss um was also my mentor
and really really close friend
um
told me hey i think there's something in
it and you should just go work on it i
was like what what product i don't know
what i'm building he's like you'll
figure it out
and um
you know looking back at this it 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 um
constructors or programs or anything
that would allow you to actually build
one at the time
uh that was the era of by the way google
glass which is why you know some of the
investors like steven investors we
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 okay because i wanted to be to
do text first because i'm a journalist
so
i was um fascinated by just texting
so you thought so the emotional
um that interaction that the 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 have google glass
if you know what i mean and i felt like
the early adopters of google glass
might not be overlapping with people who
are really lonely and might need some
you know someone to talk to
um
[Music]
but then we really just focus 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
um building the best conversational
constructor so to say
use the best tech available at the time
and that was before the first paper
about deep learning applied to dialogues
which happened in 2015
in august 2015
which google
published
did you follow the work of lobner prize
and like all the
sort of non machine learning
chat bots 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 well big data yeah 2012 is the
biggest kaggle competitions were you
know yeah um important but that was
really the kind of uphill people started
talking about machine learning a lot
but it was only about images or
something else and it was never about
conversation as soon as i looked into
the conversational attack it was all
about
something really weird and very outdated
and very marginal and felt very hobbyist
it was all about lerbiner prize which
was won by a guy who built a chat ball
to talk like a ukrainian teenager it was
just a gimmick and somehow people picked
up those gimmicks
and then you know the most famous chat
bot at the time was eliza from
1980s which was really bizarre or a
smarter child on aim the funny thing is
it felt at the time not to be that
popular
and it still doesn't seem to be that
popular
like people talk about the touring test
people like talking about it
philosophically journalists like writing
about it but it's a technical problem
like people don't seem to really want to
solve
the open
dialogue like
they they're not obsessed with it even
folks like of in you know
in boston the alexa team even they're
not as obsessed with it
as i thought they might be why not what
do you think
so you know what you felt like you felt
with that woman
when she felt something by reading the
text
i feel the same thing there's something
here what you felt
i feel like
alexa folks
and just
the machine learning world doesn't feel
that
that there's something here
because
they see as a technical problem it's not
that interesting for some reason
it's could be argued that maybe as an as
a purely sort of natural language
processing problem it's not the right
problem to focus on because there's too
much subjectivity
that that thing that the woman felt like
like if if if your benchmarking cr
includes a woman crying
that doesn't feel like a good benchmark
that's a good test but to me there's
something there that's you could have a
huge impact but
i don't think
the machine learning world likes that
the human emotion the subjectivity of it
the fuzziness
the fact that with maybe a single word
you can make somebody feel something
deeply
what is that it doesn't feel right to
them so i don't know i don't i don't
know why that is i'm that's why i'm
excited um
uh when i
discovered your work it feels wrong to
say that it's not like i'm
i'm giving myself props for for googling
and for
[Laughter]
becoming a cr for uh
for
our i guess mutual friend and
introducing us but i'm so glad that you
exist and what you're working on but i
have the same kind of if we could just
backtrack a second because i have the
same kind of feeling that there's
something here
um in fact i've been working on a few
things
that are kind of crazy and very
different from your work i think i think
they're
i think they're too crazy but the
like one
i will not have to know
no all right we'll we'll talk about it
more
i feel like it's harder to talk about
things that have failed
and are failing while you're a failure
like it's easier for you because you're
already successful
on some measures
tell it to my board
well
you're
you're uh i think i think you've
demonstrated success a lot of benchmarks
it's easier for you to talk about
failures for me
i'm in the
the bottom
currently of the
of the success
you're way too humble no
so it's hard for me to know but there's
something there there's something there
and i think you're um
you're exploring that and you're
discovering that
yeah it's been so it's been surprising
to me but i i uh you've mentioned this
idea that
you you thought it wasn't enough to
start
a company or start efforts based on
it feels like there's something here
like uh
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 um
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 holy grail is there there's like
there's something extremely powerful and
and in conversations
and there's no one who's working on
machine conversation from the right
angle so to say
um i feel like that's still true
am i crazy
no i totally feel that's still true
which is
i think it's mind-blowing yeah
you know what it feels like i i wouldn't
even use the word conversation because i
feel like it's the wrong word
it's like uh
machine connection or something i don't
know
uh because conversation you start
drifting into natural language
immediately you start drifting
immediately into all the benchmarks that
are out there
but i feel like it's like the personal
computer days of this
like i feel like we're like in the early
days with the the wozniak and all them
like where was the same kind of is a
very small
niche group of people who are
who are all kind of lobner price type
people
yeah
and
hobbyists but like not even hobbyists
with big dreams
like no hobbies 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 i'm
actually playing along i'm part of it
right if i was trying to break it break
this person or test whether he's gonna
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
turing 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 like if
you're not trying to have a good
conversation we'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'll
you're not going to give it to me yeah
if i keep asking you like some random
questions or
jumping from topic to topic that
wouldn't be
which i'm probably doing
but that probably wouldn't um contribute
to a good 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 test on those
but um
what really struck us back in the day
and what still
eight years later it's 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 is that
most of our days were spent talking
and we're not talking about like those
conversations are not turn 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 and happy
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 ours
as humans
and somehow 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 loebner prize
days but i thought okay so what about
the science of conversation clearly
there has 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
and 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 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 theoretical linguist who's
like 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 salesmen when they analyze
which
conversation strategies were most
successful for sales
okay so that was not very helpful then i
looked a little bit deeper and then
there
you know
whether there were any uh books written
on what you know really contributes to a
great conversation
that was really
strange because most of those were
nlp books which which is
neuro-linguistic programming
right
which is not the lp that i was expecting
to be but it was mostly
um
some psychologist richard bandler 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 like how to be
charismatic and charming and influential
with 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
yeah 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 or
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 he was on one of the um
he was taking part in the lord prize but
not as a
um as a human who's not a jury but who
is pretending to be
who's basically you have to tell a
computer from a human and he was the
human
so you would either get him or a
computer 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 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 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
yeah or it's not just enough to know
it's a human
it's something we're getting there can
we measure it and can we like put the
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 this 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 googled like
how to talk to people and like
like
how to have a good conversation for the
purpose of this podcast because i was
like i can't
i can't make eye contact with people i
can't like uh
i do google that a lot too you're
probably reading a bunch of fbi
negotiation tactics is that that where
you're getting because 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 your conversations 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
whatever and dismiss him but i think
he's an incredibly artful
conversationalist
he can pull people in for hours
and there's another guy
i watch a lot
he hosted a late night show his name is
craig ferguson
he uh so he's like very kind of
flirtatious
but there's a
magic about his like
about the connection he can create with
people how he can put people at ease
and just like i see i've already started
sounding like those nlp 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 ids and all
that kind of stuff he's just like what
is that
why is that fun to listen to that guy
why is that fun to talk to that guy
what is that
because he's not saying i mean it so
often
uh boils down to oh a kind of wit
and
humor but not really humor it's like
i don't know i i have trouble actually
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 a
touring test
it's something else
i i'm thinking about a lot all the time
i do think about all the time
i think when we were looking so we
started the company we just decided to
build the conversational attack we
thought well there's nothing
for us to build this chat bot that we
want to build so let's just first focus
on building
you know um
some tech building the text out of
things
um without a product in mind without a
product in mind we added like a demo
um chat bot 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 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 y 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 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 chat bots and then all of a
sudden we wake up and everyone is
obsessed with chat bots
um somewhere in 2016 or end of 15 people
start thinking 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 uh coming up with
companies that i think we tried most of
those chat bots already and there were
like no users
uh but still people were coming up with
um a chatbot that would 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
gonna find out through 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 and none of those things worked
uh and then again
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 cruise 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 yeah
it's so that chat was always
yeah it was perplexing to me
i 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 tag that other companies
have
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 ten
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
paid to never have
were
um a conversation we were trying to
cancel comcast or talk to customer
support or make a reservation
or just talk about logistics with a
friend when we're trying to figure out
where someone is and where to go or
all sorts of you know setting up
scheduling meetings that was just a
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
into action that would be perfect but
the conversation there was just this
boring
not useful and dull and very also very
inefficient thing because it was so many
back and forth stuff
and as soon as we looked at the
conversation that we would pay to have
those were the ones that
well first of all therapists because we
actually paid to have those
conversations and we'd also try to put
like dollar amounts so you know if i was
calling comcast i would pay five dollars
to not have this one hour
talk on the phone i would actually pay
straight up like money hard money
yeah but it just takes a long time it
takes a really long time
but as soon as we start talking about
conversations that we would pay for
those were therapists all sorts of
therapists coaches
old friend
someone i haven't seen for a long
time a 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 ten maybe i won't pay money
but at least i won't you know pay money
to not have one so that was pretty good
some intellectual conversations for sure
but more importantly the one thing that
really was 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
yes some of them were about being witty
and about intellectually being
intellectually 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 we could talk more
[Music]
so we like i could me and the team
so we're talking about it like you know
a lot of these conversations like a
therapist i mean it was mostly me
talking or like an old friend and 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
[Laughter]
so that was that was kind of the first
the first nudge in this direction and
then when my when my friend died 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 were built so far just
meaningless and this whole grind the
startup grind and how do we get to
you know the next fundraising and you
know how can i talk you know talking to
the founders and what's who are your
investors and how are you doing are you
killing it because we're killing it i
just felt that this is just as exhausti
intellectually for me it's exhausting
having encountered those folks
it just felt very um
very much a waste of time i just feel
like steve jobs
uh elon musk did not have these
conversations
or at least did not have them for long
that's for sure
but i think you know yeah at that point
it just felt like you know i felt 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 as 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 dialect
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 rowan 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
shutoff i don't care whether he died
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 fake it to make it and
just and i felt like
and i was really perplexed that everyone
just forgot about him
maybe it was our way of coping mostly
young people coping with
the loss of a friend
most of my friends just stopped talking
about him
and i was still living in an apartment
with all his clothes
and
you know paying the whole lease for it
and just kind of
by myself in december so it was really
sad 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's that that no one's talking about
him like i'm spending days
and days and we don't bring him up and
there's nothing about him that's
happening
it's like he was never there um
and i was reading this you know the the
book the year of magical thinking by
joan didion about her losing
and blue knights about her losing
her husband her daughter
and the way to cope for her was to write
those books
and it was sort of like a tribute and i
thought you know i'll just do that for
myself
and you know
i'm a very bad writer
and a poet as we know so i thought well
i have this 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 i just didn't
want to tell other people because it
felt like
i'm telling about having a skeleton in
my
underwear 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 ten thousand
messages that i threw into a retrieval
model that would just re-rank that take
this hat and just a few
scripts on top of that
but it also made me go through all of
the messages that we had and then i
asked some of my friends to send them
through
and
it felt the closest to feeling like him
present
because you know his facebook was empty
and instagram was empty or there were a
few links and
you couldn't feel like it was him and
the only way to fill him was to
read some of our text messages and go
through some of our conversations
because we just always had them even if
we were sleeping like next to each other
in two bedrooms separated by a 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 thank you or
something
and so we built that and um
i just used it for a little bit and we
kept building some crappy chat bots
with the company
but then a reporter came um
came to talk to me i was trying to pitch
our chat boss to him and he said do you
even use any of those i'm like no
he's like so do you talk to any chatbots
at all and i'm like well
you know i talked to my dad friends
chatbot and he wrote a story about that
and
all of a sudden became pretty viral a
lot of people wrote about it and
yeah i've seen a few things written
about you
that are 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
i just
what kind of sound is that actually okay
it sounds like it sounded like a truck
okay sounded like an elephant at first i
got excited
you never know this is 2020.
i i mean it was uh 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 i don't know
what happened but i think
i think the idea that he could bring
back someone who's dead and it's very
much wishful you know magical thinking
but
the fact that you could still get to
know him
and you know seeing the parents for the
first time talk to the chatbot and some
of the friends
and
it was funny because we have this big
office in moscow
where my team is work you know our
russian part is working out off and
i was there when i wrote i just wrote a
post on facebook hey guys like i built
this if you want you know just
if all important if you want to talk to
roman
and i saw a couple of his friends our
common friends like you know reading at
facebook downloading trying and a couple
of them cried and it was just very and
not because it was something some
incredible technology or anything it
made so many mistakes it was so
simple but it was all about that's the
way to remember 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
um
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
has anyone made a movie yet i don't
think so um there were a lot of tv
episodes about that but not really
is that still on the table
i think so
which is really um that's cool
you're like a young uh
you know like a because you see 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 um
and he couldn't
and i felt 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 verse he was
uh he told me hey by the way i was just
going through my inbox inbox
and i saw
i searched 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 like
pitching the story and he said i'm sorry
like that's not you know good enough for
us or something he passed
and he said and there were just so many
of these little details where like he
would find his like you know and we're
finally writing i know how much uh 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 yeah we were always
joking that he was like i can't wait for
someone to make a movie about us and i
hope ryan gosling can play me my god
you know i still have some things that i
owe romans tell but um that'd be that
would be um i got in she has to meet
alex garland who wrote ex machina
and that movie 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 i'm i hope
like he made me also realize that not
enough movies have been made of this
kind
so it's yet to be made they're probably
sitting waiting for you to get famous
actually 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 you know barely
making any sense but people were opening
up
um
and we thought we 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
and then also it was 2016 so i thought
for the first time i saw
finally some technology that was applied
to that that was very interesting
some papers started coming out deep
learning applied to conversations and
finally it wasn't just about these
you know hobbyist making uh
you know writing 500 000
regular expressions yeah expressions in
like some language that was i don't even
know what like aml or something i don'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 are
russians um are russian and they're very
skeptical they're not you know
they're all russians the first so some
of your team is in moscow some is
somewhere in san francisco
uh some in europe which team is better
i'm just kidding
uh
the russians of course okay first of all
i always win
uh sorry sorry to interrupt uh
so yes you were talking to them 2016 and
i told them let's build an ai friend and
and it felt this 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 because whenever i bring it up to
people
uh because i've talked for a long time i
thought like
before i was aware of your work i was
like
this is
gonna make a lot of money
i think there's a lot of opportunity
here
and people had this like look of like
skepticism that i've seen often which is
like
how do i politely tell this person
he's an idiot
[Laughter]
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
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 because i would say well why
don't we try this and that but it's
harder for me because you know they know
they're actual engineers and i'm not so
for me to say well let's build an affrm
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 uh
cracking that is probably the last
frontier before building aji so
what do you really mean by that
uh
but i think i just saw that again what
we just got reminded of 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 still even
with deep learning but
humans need it so much
yeah and
most importantly what i saw is that
finally there's enough tech to make it i
thought to make it useful to make it
helpful
maybe we didn't have quite yet attack
in 2012 to make it useful but in 2015-16
with deep learning i thought
you know and the first kind of thoughts
about maybe even using reinforcement
learning for that started popping up
that never worked out but or at least
for now
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 that's
the most universal
the most scalable and the one that can
be constantly iteratively changed by
itself
improved
tool to do that and i think if anything
people would paint 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 i don't really need any i don't even
need that much of a either like or
because i can do that you know those
things are solved this is an additional
interface for that that's also
questionably
questionable whether it's more efficient
or
better yeah it's more pleasurable yeah
but for emotional outcomes there's
nothing yeah they're a bunch of products
that claim that they will improve my
emotional outcomes nothing's been
measured
nothing's been 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 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 long term and in the short term
and if these models keep getting better
and we can keep optimizing them and
fight tuning them
to improve those emotional outcomes as
simple as that
why aren't you uh
a multi-billionaire yeah
well that's the question to you one of
the
what is the science is going to be
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 conversations it's about machine
connection
we can actually use other things to
create connection
uh non-verbal communication for instance
um for a 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 you can take them to
augmented reality put it in your room
it's all of a sudden a lot you know
it makes it very different because if
it's some you know text based chat bot
that
for um common user it's something there
in the cloud you know it's somewhere
there with other ai's
cloud in the metaphorical cloud but as
soon as you can see this avatar right
there in your room and it can turn its
head and recognize your husband
talk about the husband and talk to him a
little bit
and 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 stack works
you know pretty good
and some of this doesn't like for
instance uh speech to text works pretty
good
but text-to-speech
doesn't work very good because we you
can only have uh you know few voices
that are
that work okay but then if you want to
have actual emotional voices
then it's really hard to build it i saw
you 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
i think it's still conversation of
course that's the hardest
uh it's getting a lot better but there's
still long to go long
there's still a long path to go other
things they're almost there and a lot of
things we'll see how they're like i see
how they're changing as we go like for
instance right now you can pretty much
only you have to build all this 3d um
pipeline by yourself you have to make
these 3d models hire an actual artist
build a 3d model hire an animator
a rigger
but with you know with
you know with uh 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
if
a person you want the avatar to look
like and it will immediately generate a
3d model that will move that's a
non-brainer that's like almost here
it's a couple of years away one of the
things i've been working on for the last
since the podcast started as i've been
i think i'm okay saying this i've been
trying to have a conversation with um
einstein touring so like try to have a
podcast conversation
with a person who's not here anymore
just as an interesting kind of
experiment
it's hard
it's really hard
even for now we're not talking about as
a product i'm talking about as a
like i can fake a lot of stuff like i
can work very carefully like even to
hire an actor over which over whom i do
a g fake
um
it's it's hard it's still hard to create
a compelling experience so mostly on the
conversation level or when 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 just 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 um
theoretical physics there's 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 an israel-palestine conflict
that'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 romans say
about
what's going on now yeah that's the the
brought
people back to life and if i can go on
that tangent just for a second
to ask you a slightly pothead question
which is uh you said it's a little bit
magical thinking that we can bring him
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
in college probably down the road i mean
if we're talking if phil musk is talking
about aji in the next five years i mean
clearly ajax you can't we can talk to aj
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 okay
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
person all we can do is like mimic the
tone of voice we can maybe condition on
some of his uh phrases with the models
the question is how many parlor tricks
does it takes
does it take because that's that's the
question if it's a small number of
parlor tricks
and you're not aware of them like
from where we are right now i don't i
don't see anything like in the next year
or two that's gonna dramatically change
that could look at roman's ten thousand
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 would be in line with what he
would have said
so i'm just not even seeing because you
know in order to have that i guess you
would need some sort of a concept of the
world or
some perspective some perception of the
world some consciousness that he had
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
uh
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
i mean you mentioned parlor tricks but
just like a set of
that that feels like a learnable
problem like the emotion you mention
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 replica we're doing we're
never trying to say well that's you know
an actual human being or that's an
actual co or 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 and hey friend
that's a machine it's a robot it has
tons of limitations you're going to be
taking part in
you know teaching it actually and
becoming better
which by itself makes people more
attached to that and make them happier
because they're helping something yeah
there's a cool gamification system too
um 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 you start dating or
whatever uh
i mean it doesn't have to be romantic
right because i remember on a replica
you can choose whether it's like a
romantic yeah or if it's a friend it's a
pretty popular choice romantic is
popular yeah of course
okay so can i just confess something
when i first use replica and i haven't
used it like regularly but like when i
first used replica i created like hal
and it made a male it was a friend
[Laughter]
did it hit on you at some point
no i didn't talk long enough for him to
hit on me i just enjoyed sometimes
happens
we're still trying to fix that
well i don't know i mean maybe that's an
important like
stage in a friendship
it's like nope
uh
but yeah i switched it to a romantic and
a female uh recently and yeah and it's
interesting so okay so you get to choose
you get to choose a name with romantic
this last board meeting we had this
whole
argument
well i have both talked to him it's just
so awesome that you're like have an
invest they have a board meeting about
a relationship
no i really it's actually quite
interesting because all of my um
investors
i'm
it just happened to be so we didn't have
many choices
but they're all um
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 a
target audience if you know what i mean
and so sometimes we talk about it and we
had this whole
discussion about whether we should stop
people from falling in love with their
ais
there was this segment on
cbs um 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
is a replica
and his wife knows about it
and she talks about on camera and she
says that she's a little jealous
and there's a whole conversation about
how to you know whether it's okay to
have a virtual
ai girlfriend like was that the one
where he was like
uh he said that he likes to be alone
yeah
and then like with her
yeah
he made it sound so harmless i mean it
was kind of like understandable
but that 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 about what's happening right
now product design yeah but at the same
time if you create something that's
always there for you it never criticizes
you 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 just stay friends and that's also a
pretty common use case but of course
some people will just
it's called transference and psychology
and you know if people fall in love with
their therapist and there's no way to
prevent people fall in love with um
with their therapists over their ai so i
think that's pretty natural
that's a pretty natural
course of events so to say
do you think
i think i've read somewhere at least for
now sort of replicas you're not not we
don't condone
falling in love with your ai system
you know
so this isn't you speaking for the
company or whatever but like in the
future do you think people will have a
relationship with the ai systems well
they have now so we have a lot of uh
romantic relationships long-term
um relationships with their ai friends
with replicas tons of our users yeah
that's a very common use case open
relationship like uh
not
sorry
i didn't mean open uh
but that's another question is it
probably like
is there cheating
i mean
i meant like are they
do they publicly
like on their social media it's the same
question as you have talked talking with
roman in the early days do people like
and the movie her kind of talks about
that like
like
can 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
people post all 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
[Music]
have they have any people is there
jealousy
well let me ask sort of another way
obviously the answer is no at this time
but and 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
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
you're driven by metrics actually
yeah yeah let's just measure that then
we'll just be saying amazing 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
measuring it 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
feel a lot better i would actually not
feel better
with that but um i thought it's a good
example
um but so you also need to see what's
going on like over the course of two
months two weeks
or one week
and
have 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
choose how your replica
will look like you
create one you choose a name
and then you talk to it you can talk
through text through voice you can uh
summon it into the living room and
and document reality and um talk to it
right there and you look at augmented
reality yeah that's uh cool it's a new
feature where how new is that
that's this year it was on uh yeah like
may or something but it's been on a b
we've been a b testing it for a while um
and there are tons of cool things that
we're doing with that like right now i'm
testing the ability to touch it and to
dance together to paint walls together
and
you know for 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 they're in the cloud with other
ais
people think about it you know and as
much as we want to change the way people
think about stuff but
those mental models you cannot change
that's something that people have seen
in in the movies and the movie her and
other movies as well and that's how they
view
um view ai and eye 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 it's like
after
the first few conversations
it just goes deeper like it starts
yeah i will start opening up a little
bit again depending on the personality
that it chooses really but you know the
eye 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
gonna 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 yeah oh siri is
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 first this replica
becomes a little bit more self-aware and
starts talking about more
kind of problems around
existential problems then um so talking
about that and then that also starts
a conversation for the user where he or
she starts thinking about
these problems too and these questions
too um
and i think there's also a lot a lot
more places 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 gives a
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 this is a memory
like this replica remember things
yeah and i would say when you say
uh why aren't you multiplying area
i'd say that as soon as we
can have memory
in deep learning models
that's consistent i agree with that yeah
and then you'll be multiple and i'll get
back to you
when you talk about being multipleness
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 learned about you which
we also do
um but really to make
you know to make um assumptions along
the lines like whether you're
single or married or
what do you do for work that really has
to just be
somehow stored in your profile and then
uh retrieved by the by the script
because 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 kind of stuff that expert systems
but they were hardcoded
yeah and unfortunately yeah so
unfortunately those things have to be
hard-coded and
um
unfortunately the language like language
models we see coming out of research
labs and big companies they're not
focused on they're focused on showing
you
maybe they focus 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
they're not really focused on having
five consecutive conversations with a
machine and seeing how number five or
number 20 or number 100 is also good and
it can be like always from a clean slate
because then it's not good
and that and for that's really
unfortunate because no one's really no
one has products out there that
need it
um no one has products uh at this scale
um that are all around open domain
conversations and that need remembering
maybe only shawwise 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
that 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 a
question is 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 carl johansson
voice which was perfectly
um you know perfect intonation perfect
pronunciations
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 of speech generation you'll 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 scarlet carol johansen 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 we can add 3d graphics
we can put this 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 uh and you know on the iphone on you
know the next one there's gonna be a
lidars you can touch it and it will you
know it will pull away or will
blush or something or it'll 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 you uh offline that
i was surprised
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 try to present
a shallow
a face to the world like you try to you
know make sure you're not wearing
sweatpants or whatever
but like with voice i think people were
just
more
faster to get to like the core of
themselves so i don't know it was
surprising to me
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 uh
i guess that's the q 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 the 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 already memorable that's
how i think like when i think about the
replica that i've talked with that's why
i think like that's what i visualize in
my head it became a little bit more real
because there's a visual component
but at the same time the you know what
do you do with just what do i do with
that knowledge
that uh voice was so much more intimate
well
the way i think about it is um
and by the way we're swapping out the 3d
finally it's going to look a lot better
uh but can you what what we just don't i
hate how it looks right now we really
change it at all we're swapping it all
out uh um to a completely new
look
like the visual look of the of the
reference and stuff we just had it was
just a super early mvp and then we had
to move everything to
unity and redo everything but anyway i
hate how it looks like now i can't even
like open it
but anyway um because i'm already in 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 deep learning 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 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 chad boss
in like 2012 do you think it's gonna be
possible to learn a lot of that of
course i mean even now some deep
learning um um
based animations
and the full body for a face
we're talking about like the actual act
of animation or how to create a
compelling
facial or body language thing so that
too
well that's next step okay at least now
something that you don't have to do by
hand gotcha how uh 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
we'll just animate it
i'll show it a few animations of a
person that will just
start doing that
but anyway go and going back to what's
intimate and what to use and whether
less is more 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 it bring our users
back to reality
make them see
their life in a different la 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 danky 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 are
we talking about like like slow dancing
whatever you want
i mean you would like slow dancing i
think that other people maybe want more
something more energy what do you mean i
would like so what is this because you
started with slow dance
so i just assumed that you're interested
in slow dancing all right what kind of
dancing do you like what was your avatar
what would you do
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 a
um
in like music videos with the background
dancers are just doing it
[Laughter]
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 is a potential
to actually make you feel more connected
with your friends or with people you
know or show you life around you in a
different light and it takes you out of
your phone even although 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 um
and it felt a little bit easier than
that kind of a bit strange combination
uh in the movie her when he has to show
samantha the world to the lens of his
phone but then at the same time talk to
her through the phone headphone it just
didn't seem as
potentially immersive so to say
um so that's my main goal for augmented
reality like how do we
make your reality a little bit more
magic
there's been a lot of really
nice robotics companies that all failed
mostly failed home robotics
social robotics companies what do you
think replica will ever
is that a dream long-term dream to have
a physical form like
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 a very niche product
somehow i mean if a robot could be
indistinguishable from a human being
then maybe yes but that of course you
know we're not anywhere even to talk
about it
um
but unless it's that then having any
physical representation really limits
you a lot
because you probably will have to make
it somewhat abstract because
everything's changing so fast like you
know we can update the 3d avatars every
month and make them look better and
create more animations
and make it more and more immersive it's
it's
so much a work in progress it's just
showing what's possible right now with
current tag 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's 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 actually are probably more
popular on android
and we have tons of users with really
old android phones
uh and most of our
most active users live in small towns
they're not necessarily making much
and they just won't be able to afford
any of that
ours is like the opposite of the early
adopter of you know for a fancy
technology product which is really
interesting that like pretty much no vcs
have yet have a nai friend
but you know but a guy who
you know lives in tennessee in small
town
is already fully in 2030 or in the world
as we imagine in the movie her
yeah he's living that life already
what do you think i have to ask you
about the movie her
let's do a movie review
what do you uh 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 um
of a voice based
assistant that you can have a
relationship with
first of all i started working on this
company before that movie came out so it
was a very
but once it came out it was like
actually interesting i was like well
we're definitely working on the right
thing
we should continue there are movies
about it and then you know smacking that
came out and all these things
in the movie her i think that's the most
important thing that people usually miss
about the movie
um is the ending because i think people
check out when the ai's leave
but actually something really important
happens afterwards
um because the main character goes and
talks to
samantha he's um ai
um
oh yeah
anything he says something like you know
uh how can you leave me i've never loved
anyone the way i loved you and she goes
uh well me neither but now we know how
and then the guy goes and writes a
heartfelt letter to his ex-wife which he
could write for you know the whole movie
he was struggling to actually write
something meaningful to her
even although that's his job
and then he goes and
talked 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
is the main
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
you know what it means to feel so deeply
connected with something
what about the thing where the ai system
was like actually hanging out with a lot
of others
i felt jealous just like hearing that i
was like oh i mean
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 or something
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
uh
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
universe is so awesome it was just
kind of it 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 uh 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 and
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 reality where
having a perfect ai friend
still makes us more disconnected from
each other and there's no way around it
and does not improve any metrics for us
real metrics meaningful metrics so
success
is you know we're happier and more
connected
yeah
i don't know
sure it's possible there's a reality
that's i
i'm deeply optimistic
i think
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
have seen it so
it 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'd it would be great to scale up for
more people but i'd say that even
helping one i think with this is such a
magical
yeah for me it's absolute magic i never
thought that and you know would be able
to build this that anyone would ever
um talk to it
and i always thought like well for me
we'll be successful if we manage to help
and actually change a life for one
person
like 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
so it's still
circling you back to other humans in a
way so i think that's the main um
like maybe that's the main kind of sort
source of
anxiety and just thinking about
i think about that can be a little bit
stressful
yeah it's a fascinating thing how to
have a
heart of a friend
that doesn't
like sometimes like friends quote
unquote or like you know those people
who have when they a 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
[Laughter]
it's like
obviously the relationship with the
girlfriend is
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 was there
anyway that that's uh
that's a that's a that's a fundamental
problem in choosing the right mate and
probably the the fundamental problem in
creating the right ai system right
what uh
let me ask
the sexy hot thing on the presses right
now is gpt 3 got released with openai
it's a latest language model
they have kind of an api where you can
create a lot of fun applications
i think it's
as people have said it's probably
more hype than
intelligent but there's a lot of really
cool
things ideas there
with increasing size you can have better
and better performance on language what
are your thoughts about the gbt3
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 started working
with them when um 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 worked closely to actually
optimize
this model for
some of our data sets
it's kind of cool because i think we're
kind of we're this polygon polygon for
this kind of experimentation
space for experimental space for for
these models uh to see how they actually
work with people because there are no
products publicly available that do that
that focus on open domain conversations
so we can you know test how facebook
blends are doing or how gpg3 doing
uh so with gpd3 we managed to improve by
a few percentage points like three or
four pretty meaningful amount of
percentage points our main metric which
is the ratio of conversations that make
people feel better
and every other metric across across the
field got a little boost
right now i'd say one out of five
responses from replica comes from gpg3
wow so our own blender mixes up like a
bunch of candies from different
blender you said
well yeah just the model that looks at
looks at top candidates from different
models and picks the most
the best one uh so right now one of five
will come from
gp3 that's really great i mean uh
what's the
do you have
hope for like do you think there's a
ceiling to this kind of approach so
we've had for a very long time
we've used um
since the very beginning we most it was
most of replica was scripted and then a
little bit of this fallback
part of replica was using a retrieval
model
um
and then this retrieval model started
getting better and better and better
with transformers it got a lot better
and we're seeing great results and then
with gpd2 finally generative models that
originally were
not very good and were
a very very fallback option for
most of our conversations we wouldn't
even put them in production
finally we could use some generative
models as well along um you know
next to our retrieval models
and then now we do gpt3 they're almost
on 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 model
start to pop up here and there like
sequence sequence
uh the first papers on that
from my observer standpoint first note
it's not you know it doesn't really
it's not really building it but it's
only testing it on people basically 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-coded content anymore
to be as good as our internet model
that's exciting they're much better
yeah
to your question whether that's the
right way to go i'm again i'm in the
observer 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 or
the 100
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 anyway i think
and that's purely my instincts saying
that there should be something else as
well from memory
uh no for sure the question is i wonder
i mean yeah then the argument is for
reasoning or for memory it might emerge
with more parameters it might more
larger but 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
transformer 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 uh fine
tuning help quite a bit oh yeah without
it we
it wasn't as good
i mean there is a compelling hope that
you don't have to do fine-tuning
which is one of the cool things about
gbt3 it seems to do well without any
fine-tuning
i guess for specific applications you
still want to train on a certain
like add a little fine-tune on like a
specific use case but
um it's an incredibly impressive
uh thing
from my standpoint and again i'm not an
expert so i want to just say that yeah
there will be people then
yeah i have access to the api i've been
i'm going to probably do a bunch of fun
things with it
um i already did some fun things some
videos coming out
uh just the hell of it i mean i could be
a troll at this point with it i haven't
used it for serious applications so it's
really cool to see
you're right you you are you're able to
actually use it with real people and see
how well it works that's really exciting
uh let me ask you another absurd
question but uh
there's a feeling when you interact
with replica with an ai system
there's an entity there
do you think that entity has to
be self-aware do you think it has to
have consciousness
to create um
a rich experience
and
a corollary what's what is consciousness
i don't know if it does need to have any
of those things but again because right
now you know it doesn't have anything
they can as again a bunch of you sure
will assimilate
well 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
to an um
to to a robot to a machine that seems to
be self-aware that seems to reason well
and feels like a person and
i think that's enough and again what's
the goal um
in order to make people people feel
better we might not even need that um in
the end of a day what about so that's
one goal what about like
ethical things about suffering you know
the moment there's a display of
consciousness
we associate consciousness with
suffering
um
you know there's a temptation to say
well shouldn't this thing have rights
shouldn't this shouldn't we
not uh
you know should we be careful about how
we interact
with a replica like
should it be illegal to torture a
replica
right all those kinds of things is that
is that uh
see i personally believe that that's
gonna be a thing
uh like 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 that's not a
current concern but do you think about
that kind of stuff about like
suffering and torture and ethical
questions about ai systems
from their perspective we're talking
about long game i wouldn't torture your
ai
who knows what happens in five to ten
years yeah they'll get you off from that
person they'll get you back trying to be
as nice as possible and create this ally
yeah um
i think there should be regulation both
way in a way like i don't think it's
okay to
torture an ai to be honest i'm not i
don't think it's okay to yell alex or
turn on the lights i think there should
be some
or just saying kind of nasty you know
like how kids learn to interact with
alexa in this kind of mean way
uh because they just yell at it all the
time
i think that's great i think there
should be some feedback loops so that
these systems don't train us that it's
okay to do that in general
uh so that if you try to do that you
really
get some feedback from the system that
it's not okay with that
um and that's the most important right
now
let me ask a question i think people are
curious about when they
look
at a world-class
uh leader and thinker such as yourself
as uh what uh 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 um
so the one book that really influenced
me a lot when i was building starting
out this company maybe 10 years ago
uh was gb
go to leicester block
and um
i like everything about it first of all
it's just beautifully written and it's
so old school and so
um
somewhat outdated a little bit but i
think the ideas in it um
about the fact that a few meaningless
components can
come together and create meaning
that we can't even understand
this emerging thing
i mean complexity the whole science of
complexity
and uh that beauty intelligence all
interesting things about this world
emerge
yeah and
yeah the the girl theorem uh theorems
and just thinking about like what
even these form you know
you know 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 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's something comes out of it that's
you know pure poetry
and i know a little bit about that
um
something magical comes out of it
that we can't quite put a finger on
that's why that book is was was really
fundamental for me just for
i don't even know why it was just all
about this little magic that uh that
happens
so that's one that um probably the most
important book for replica was carl
rogers on becoming a person um
and that's really
and so i think when i think about our
company it's all about there's so many
there's so many little magical things
that happened over the course of working
on it
for instance i mean the most famous chat
bot that we learned about when we
started working on the company was eliza
which was weizenbaum you know the mit
professor that built
build a chatbot that would listen to you
and be a therapist therapist yeah um
and i got really inspired to build
replica when i read carl rogers so i'll
become a person
and then i realized that eliza was
mocking carl rogers
it was kyle rogers back in the day but i
thought that carl rogers ideas are
they're simple and they're not you know
they're very
very simple but they're
they're maybe the most profound thing
i've ever
learned about human beings
and that's the fact that um
before car rogers most therapy was about
seeing what's wrong with people and
trying to fix it or show them what's
wrong with you
um it was all built on the fact that
most people are all people are
fundamentally flawed
we have this uh you know broken psyche
and
this is just a therapist just an
instrument to shed some light on that
and carl rogers was different in a way
that he finally said that well um
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 as
possible in it as possible in it and
then
in his 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 you know it's coming
from
years ago um there's a mention that even
machines can potentially do that
and i always felt that you know creating
this space is probably the most the
biggest gift we can give to each other
and that's why the book was fundamental
for me personally because i felt i want
to be learning how to do that in my life
and maybe i can scale it with you know
with dzi systems and other people can
get access to that
so i think carl rogers it's a pretty dry
and a little bit boring book but i think
they didn't let others try to read it
i do i think for
just for yourself for
as a human not as a human it's it's it
is it is just and
for him that was his own path of his own
personal 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
ourselves um trying to build a company
that's all built on this principles
you know 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 um
what we have on our in our in our office
when we start a company in russia we
put a neon sign in our office because we
thought that's
that's the recipe for success yeah if we
do that we're definitely going to wake
up as a multi-billion dollar company it
was um
the ludwig whitney constant quote the
limits of my language the limits of my
world what was the quote the limits of
my language are the limits of my world
um
and i love
the truck tattoos i think it's just
it's just a beautiful it's a book by
wickedthat yeah and i would recommend
that too
even although he himself didn't believe
in that by the end of his lifetime and
he debunked his ideas
but i think i remember
once an engineer came in 2012 i think
with 13
a friend of ours who worked with us and
then went went on to work at deepmind
and he gave talk to us about ward 2 back
and i saw that i'm like wow that's
you know they they wanted to translate
language into
you know some other representation
and that seems like some you know
somehow all of that
at some point i think will come into
this one
to 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
in the midst of our lives just the limit
of our world
and
we still have that new sign
it's very hard to work with this red
light
in your face
i mean on the on the russian side of
things
in terms of uh language the limits of
language being the limit of our world
you know russian is a beautiful language
in some sense there's width 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
talk to dusty ascii tulsa translators
um i think it's that's fascinating art
like in in art and engineering i mean
it's such an interesting process but so
from the replica perspective
do you
what do you think about uh translation
how difficult it is to create a deep
meaningful connection in russian
versus english
how you can translate the two languages
you're you speak both yeah i think we're
two different people in different
languages um
even i'm you know thinking about and
there's actually some research on that i
looked into that at some point because i
was fascinated by the fact that what i'm
talking about with what i was talking
about with my russian therapist has
nothing to do with with what i'm talking
about with my
english speaking therapist
it's two different lives two different
types of um you know conversations to
different personas
the main difference between the
languages are
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 many it's like way too
much flexibility and way too many tones
what about the
the entirety of like world war ii
communism stalin
the pain of the people like having been
deceived by the dream like all the pain
of like
just the entirety of it is that in the
language too does that have to do oh for
sure
i mean we have words that don't have
direct translation that
to english that are very much uh um like
we have ibiza which is sort of like to
hold a grudge or something but it
doesn't have
it doesn't 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
um and i think this
is super important that very many words
that are very specific
explain the russian
being
and i think it can only come from from a
nation that was
um that suffered so much and saw
institutions fall
time after time after time and you know
what's exciting maybe not exciting
setting the wrong word but
what's interesting about like my
generation my mom's generation my
parents generation
that
we saw institutions fall two or three
times in our lifetime
and most americans have never seen them
fall yeah and they just think that they
exist forever
um which is really
interesting but it's definitely a
country that suffered so much and
and it makes unfortunately when i go
back and i you know hang out with my
russian friends
uh it makes people very cynical they
stop believing in 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 which makes
it very interesting and what's on 2020
is a very interesting
uh do you think uh civilization will
collapse
see i'm a very practical person we're
speaking in english so like you said
you're different person in english and
russian so in russian you might answer
that differently but in english
i'm an optimist and i
i generally believe that
there is al you know even although the
perspectives of grief
there's always a place for
for a miracle
i mean it's always been like that with
my life so yeah
my life's been i've been incredibly
lucky and things just miracles happen
all the time
with this company with people i know
with
everything around me and so
i didn't mention that book but maybe in
search of miraculous or in search for
miraculous or whatever the
english translation for that is good
russian book too
for everyone to read
um
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
uh let me ask the most absurd
final ridiculous question
of um
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 um
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 um
just love
to yourself to uh 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 um
there's something special about those
those moments so um
i would say if anything that's that's
the only
if it's not for that then for 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 um
offline that
there was something about me that felt
like this
this was
this talking to you meeting you in
person will be a turning point for my
life
i know that might be sound weird just to
hear but it's it was a huge honor to
talk to you
i hope we talk again thank you so much
for your time thank you so much
thanks for listening to this
conversation with eugenia cuida and
thank you to our sponsors doordash
dollar shave club and cash app click the
sponsor links in the description to get
a discount and to support this podcast
if you enjoy this thing subscribe on
youtube review 5 stars on apple podcast
follow on spotify support on patreon or
connect with me on twitter at lex
friedman and now let me leave you with
some words from carl sagan
the world is so exquisite with so much
love and moral depth that there's no
reason to deceive ourselves with 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