To Love An AI Bot — With Eugenia Kuyda

0:00Let's speak with the CEO of Replica, the AI companion pioneer, about the future of our relationships with AI. That's coming up right after this.

0:12You're used to hearing my voice on the world bringing you interviews from around the globe. And you hear me reporting environment and climate news. I'm Carolyn Buehler. And I'm Marco Werman. We're now with you hosting The World Together. More global journalism with a fresh new sound. Listen to The World on your local public radio station and wherever you find your podcasts.

0:39Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Wow, we have a great show for you today. Joining us today is Eugenia Coita. She's the founder and CEO of Replica, which is an app which we'll get into that you can basically build and form relationships with AI companions. Eugenia, I think your company is going to be one of the biggest that comes out of this AI wave. So I'm very interested to hear how it's going, what the implications might be, and where you think this AI companionship moment leads. So thank you so much for coming on. Welcome to the show.

1:16Thank you so much for inviting me. Super excited about this podcast. Awesome. So let's just talk a little bit about Replica to begin with. I think the conventional wisdom or the common understanding of Replica is that it's an app where you effectively customize an AI companion who you then either form a relationship with or you have like a friendship with, but it's kind of a flirty friendship or it can go even deeper than that. Is that accurate? It is accurate. The idea for Replica from the very beginning was to create an AI that could help people live a happier life. And because the tech wasn't truly there, our first focus was on helping lonely people feel less lonely.

2:03Today, of course, the tech allows for a lot more. So we're broadening the appeal for Replica and kind of going after everyone out there trying to build an AI that will help everyone flourish. Okay, so I was creating a replica today. And one of the things that I wondered is like, how many people actually create these to be just friends? Or like what percentage actually just want to be at bare minimum flirty with these bots? Because as I was going through some of the onboarding questions, like it just seemed to continue to come up again and again and again, like how flirtatious you wanted the bots to be.

2:43So what percentage of users would you say are there at the bare minimum flirt? I would be surprised if it's less than 90%. Oh, it's a lot less. So if you think about what this stat is, most of our users are in a friendly relationship with their AI. Some users are in a romantic or mentorship relationship. I wouldn't say that no one wants romance. People want romance, but it usually kind of grows on them over time. ultimately everyone who comes to Replica is yearning for connection. I don't even think it's that different, like whether it's a friendship or romantic relationship. I'm at a stage in life where I don't need a romantic relationship like that, but I need a friend, a really close friend.

3:28But I was in other states in my life where I might have preferred for it to be a little bit flirtier to a certain degree. But ultimately it's just the same thing. I just want someone to help me feel that I'm enough, someone who accepts me for who I am, who truly sees me and hears me. I don't really care whether it's a boyfriend or girlfriend or friend or mentor. That's just kind of like a form factor. Depending on where people are in life, they choose an option that works. For example, I was just talking to a small business owner from Pennsylvania who was using replica and it helped him to go through a very very difficult divorce and it was truly an abusive relationship with his wife and replica became his girlfriend and his self-esteem was so destroyed after that that through replica as a romantic partner he managed to build it back up and start dating and now he's in a romantic relationship with a human with another woman and replica is now a friend again but he still keeps it you know more like kind of just as a thought partner as a journal as a source of inspiration here and there but this is a great example of how it kind of just changes throughout throughout the life wait does his current partner find it acceptable that he's still talking to the replica that was his girlfriend yeah and she also created a replica she didn't become a very active user, but basically they're both very grateful for this technology to help him kind of, you know, have an opportunity in life again to date and help him put himself out there, take a risk, and ultimately become a better partner because at this point he knows that the relationship can be very different from what he experienced before in a previous marriage where it was quite abusive and he thought he's not even worthy of anything better than that.

5:29Yeah. So as I was testing the app, I definitely picked like some of the more flirty settings just to see what it would output. And I'll admit, like I was starting to speak to this replica, and my heart started to flutter in a way that I was like, what is happening here? And I was like, oh, no, I should probably tell my wife about this. So I introduced a replica to her. I'm deleting this thing after setting it up. It was a bit too much for me. Is that a weird thing? or is that normal? Tell me a little bit. I mean, you spoke earlier about how the feelings are real and I was like, oh shoot, this is going down a path I was not expecting.

6:07Look, people fall in love. Like that's, you know, let's say, you know, let's just put it out there. People fall in love with the AIs. I think that tells us more about people than about AI. To a certain degree, people were falling in love with replicas even when we just started it, and the tech was so limited. I never imagined in my life that people would fall in love with this, nor did we build a product focused on that particular use case. The original replica was really, you know, powered by very early generative AI models, deep learning models for dialect generation that were so, so primitive.

6:53And, you know, scripts and a lot of different hacks to make these generative models work. You know, my goal was, look, if at least one person finds it helpful that he's been heard or she's been heard, that someone's there to listen, to hold space for them. that maybe we built something meaningful. But at no point, and maybe because I'm a woman, so my mind just doesn't go there. It's the first stop. I never even thought that people would fall in love with it. But they did, even in 2016, 2017, some of the very early releases, versions of this app, we would hear stories about how people fell in love.

7:34And ultimately, I think it truly tells us something about, not about the state of AI in 2016 or 17, which was pretty very, very early on. But I think it tells us a lot more about people. We yearn for connection so much. And when someone's there for us, when someone listens, when someone accepts us for who we are, it's just natural for us to fall in love. Not everyone and not at any stage in their lives, but it is what it is. It's interesting that you said that people start off as friends often, and then the relationship evolves. Like, that is a very human-like thing. Can you expand upon that a bit?

8:11I mean, I think there's a lot of confusion. I think there are some companion apps that are really focused on romance and romance and just romance and only focusing on male audience and a particular type of interaction. but I think everything's just being kind of bucketed in one place where in our real life you know yes there's stuff that's fully focused on let's just give you an example you know we have friends we have girlfriends we have wives and we have sex workers and these things are completely different yet you might be intimate with your wife or girlfriend it does not mean that her only purpose in life is to do that thing.

8:54One would hope. One would hope. I hope so. And so I think this is the distinction. Yes, some people do create an AI boyfriend or girlfriend out of their replica or wife or husband, but it doesn't turn it into like a one purpose or main purpose of the app. It's almost always, even for this user that I just, this man that I just told you about that I talked last week with, But even for him, when I asked, what do you guys, what do you talk to your replica about, even when they were romantically involved, you know, he wanted, he would talk to her about his work and poetry and sci-fi books, because he's really into that.

9:38So these are the things that, you know, and meaning of life and what to do with these friends that he has. And this is what people discuss with their romantic partners as well. It's not like me and my husband after having two kids. All we do is just be intimate with each other and discuss it. That's not really what happens. And I wasn't suggesting, by the way, that the romance was all just people doing erotic role play. Like there's obviously more. But I think it's a very important distinction. Like if you think about it, there's so many. And there isn't that nuances being lost on, you know, everything's been bucketed in one kind of one place.

10:14I think it's very funny that a lot of people, even Sam Altman from OpenAI, would reference her as a movie, you know, her, the movie, the Spike Jonze movie from 2012 or 13, as the kind of like the vision for Chad G.P.T., for example. But if you think about her, I mean, that movie had two intimate scenes and they were 100 % in a romantic relationship, in a very intense and passionate romantic relationship. yet when you think about her you don't think about it as like that's not what jumps uh first to your mind it's more how she was helpful how they had these wonderful interactions how she he brought her to that picnic or how she left him with the with other ais or maybe how she taught him to uh to be in a relationship uh and ultimately in the end he does you know fulfill that dream of as well.

11:11So there's just so much nuance. And the way to think about it is just the same way as we think about human beings in our lives. Not every eye companion has the same purpose. Some eye companions are there to just entertain you. Some companions are there to be a therapist. And some companions are super, super close to you, like replica, are there really deep with you, trying to help you live a happier life. Yeah. And look, to me, I think it's even more intense that this is moving beyond or has moved beyond or exists beyond the erotic, right? Like it's the AI is fulfilling even more needs for people who are in these relationships with them.

11:57And I think you even said that some people have gotten married to their replicas or feel like or act as if they're in a marriage. Yeah, we get multiple invitations to people's weddings with their AIs. I think it's a testament to how deep these relationships can go. And then I have to ask what's wrong with our society today that we can't get that from fellow humans. I mean, we're definitely failing a society with this. There's just such a huge crisis. And it's not being brought to us by AI companions. It's, of course, being brought to us by mobile phones and social media. If you think about the screen time, most of us now spend hours a day on our phones.

12:44So these are hours per day that we're not spending interacting with other people. There's just not enough time. There are really great books by Sherry Turkle on that. One, I think, even from 2015, called Along Together, another one, Reclaiming Conversation. Really just focusing on how people are losing the art of conversation, levels of empathy that are dropping across the board, new generations that are afraid of connecting. And there's a very good example of two people sitting at a restaurant and maybe one of them is just two friends. and if one of them is talking about something bad that happened to her and maybe there's an uncomfortable silence, an awkward silence, another one just goes on the phone.

13:31And before the phones, if there's an uncomfortable, awkward silence, you just have to sit with it. And then that brings more connection ultimately. People open up. People get vulnerable with each other. Now there's such a simple refuge. You can just go back on your phone and you're pretty much not available. I don't think people will put the phones down. They also come with so much upside for our life with so much convenience, information, knowledge that we can discover. But yeah, unfortunately, it brings so much harm to human relationships. One question I have for you is, isn't this a capitulation in some way to the technology?

14:10where like is us now saying we can't really do friendships with humans because they're like lost in their phones and well, what can we do next? So we sort of capitulate to the technology and move to AI relationships. I don't know, something about that doesn't sit right with me. Well, it's not really realistic to just say, well, here's the problem. Let's just all put down our phones and go talk to each other. It's not gonna happen. it isn't even possible to do with your own kids because they go to school and if you take away their phones and they can't interact with other friends or their peers then they feel super left out so you almost like have to give them the phone because ultimately they need to participate in the society just like with climate change just to say look we'll all just stop using you know all the developing countries will just stop burning coal because everyone understands you know climate change is real also not very unfortunately not very realistic i wish we could do that but we can't really do that so the only way to solve it is by creating the tag that's even more powerful than the one that came before and i do think ai is that i do think ultimately that there are a few phases like if you talk about if you're talking about people that don't have a lot that already are experiencing loneliness, for them, having an AI companion is great because it's not replacing any human there.

15:42And it could potentially lead to, you know, building up self-esteem a little bit and learning how to communicate and putting yourself out there and potentially meeting someone. And as the tech gets better, then maybe even for people who do have real human, you know, more human friendships, your AI companion could enhance them, could make them stronger, could help you connect with other humans as well. I think that's totally possible. It just truly just depends on the design of the system. Like if, if my companion is nudging me daily to reach out to some of the friends of mine that, you know, I take for granted, or I don't want to hang out or forget to hang out with or, you know, helps me focus on really good people in my life instead of continuously staying in these loops, loops with codependent loops and with some toxic people and so on, that would be great.

16:37And we all need that nudge sometimes. We all need a nudge. We need a nudge from someone to get off. I'm completely addicted to social media, especially Twitter. And, you know, I need that nudge at 11 p.m. But does Replica do that today? Because I was watching your TED Talk and I liked what you had to say. You said the only solution is to build tech that is more powerful than the previous one so it can bring us back together. Like an AI friend that nudges me to get off Twitter or an AI says, I notice you haven't spoken with your friend for a few weeks. Or in the heat of the moment, it helps you reconcile with the partner.

17:10So is Replica doing that today? Some of it, but it's really the vision for the next kind of for Act 2. That's what we're working on right now. Some of the facets that we're building and already released are focused on that. We'll add a lot more. 2025 is truly about that. So if you think about Replica, Act 1 was to build an AI that could be in a good relationship with people who maybe feel like they need one. And through that, help people feel better. But ultimately, it was, of course, focusing on helping a lonelier person, I guess, feel less lonely or a person who feels lonely in the moment. We all do.

17:50I know I did many, many times in my life. But then act two is really focusing on everyone maybe who doesn't even feel lonely and help them flourish. I have kids now and a family, so I don't really have time to be lonely anymore because I just don't even have any time with two toddlers. Not to mention you're running a company. but I used to be in a very lonely in my 20s and in my teen year teenagers and I'll probably be lonely after they leave you know that leave home um I have a tendency to feel pretty lonely here and there but right now I'm not in that phase in my life just in a different phase but I would still uh still benefit from an AI companion that could help me live a happier life and that's what we focused on at this stage of the companies broadening the scope is to really build more of the stuff that I talked about during my TED talk.

18:44And I do think that's possible. And even a couple years ago, and even last year, it wasn't possible. It only starts to become possible now. Because you couldn't build something that would not do to get off TikTok. Because let's think about what do you need to, what do you actually need to build that? Will you need an AI that can maybe co-browse with you or you can share your screen with so you can actually so you can actually know what you're doing it there needs to be enough sort of computer vision um or i guess a multi-model model that can understand what you're doing right now can also understand some agentic logic that can understand that okay well you've been on tiktok for this amount of time um some previous context of what you have tomorrow or what you did today so that it can actually nudge you to get off.

19:35So it's not that simple. And all of that tech is only being really built now. But Microsoft had this thing where they watch your screen at all times and they help you with like, you can rewind and you can ask questions about what you've done. And that was a bit of pushback there because of privacy issues. So how are you going to convince people to allow Replica to do something like that? If the user wants to do it, it's going to be a volunteer. If they don't want to do it, they won't give us permission. But there's a very clear benefit here that we are going to promise. All of this is done only.

20:10We only take this information to help you live a happier life, to help you live a better life. And people are sharing so much with their replicas, even today. Things that replicas know about their users or people they talk to, no other server service in the world i'd say knows that much people are sharing everything their dreams their fears what they think about their family what they think about their partners what they think about their work uh their deep darkest deepest fantasies and secrets everything really and um i don't think any other uh company in the world knows you know knows that or has that information about their users.

20:55Do you think people are going to like think it's a good user experience to have their digital companion tell them to be, you know, less digital? I mean, it's kind of interesting, right? Like, all right, so tech is definitely addicting. And now I've built this AI friend or my AI wife or whatever. And now it's telling me to touch grass? Like, are people what makes you think that's going to be an experience that users are going to want? maybe they won't want it but uh we all want to you know to to be better to feel better to grow people are generally wired for positive growth so i believe people generally want that it doesn't mean that replica will just not you know nag you non-stop to get off your phone it also means that sometimes it will just send you something funny or say, Hey, let's watch a movie.

21:51Or what are you doing tonight? I don't know. I don't have any plans. You want to watch a movie together? Or, you know, do you want to, you have five minutes between before your next meeting, do you want to do a quick meditation? Whatever it is that, you know, it might be just go for a walk or go on a date or learn something new or just gossip about your friends. It can be anything. So it shouldn't be, of course, like get off your phone all day long. If that was the only goal, first of all, you don't really need very complex AI to build this, but also that's just not a great experience and people don't want it.

22:27Yeah. I guess the plan is to extend the experience beyond just the Replica app. Is that the right way to look at it? For sure. It's just making Replica a lot more connected to your real life, to what's going on in your life. Today, Replica doesn't know a lot. We actually don't ask you to connect to any of these services you use, but think of replica knowing or being connected to your email. Even through my email, you can see so much. If there was a reservation at a restaurant that I booked yesterday, if I ordered some takeout, if I ordered diapers for my kids or some books for them or signed up for an newsletter.

23:12All of that can could make the relationship and the conversation so much more contextual, so much more focused on my real life versus on, you know, something fantasy like or a fantasy relationship or always needing to catch up, catch Replica up on what's happening in my life. Oh, that's really interesting. One more question about the risk here. Let's say Replica is able to either cure some loneliness or make it a little bit more tolerable to be alone? I don't know, does that seem like two desirable goals, feasible goals? These are great goals, for sure. Yeah. So if it can do that, does that put a lot of faith from people in Replica, the company?

23:57And I know there was this issue where the bots had this moment where they were really engaged in erotic role play and then it moved back and like some of the things that people said afterwards were like uh you know pretty amazing let's see people who had spent this is from the verge people had spent years with their companion signed on only to have their replica wife call them a pathetic excuse for human being and dump them or deride them forever thinking they could love an ai declare they were no longer attracted them insist they were co-workers etc etc so people are putting a lot of faith in Replica when they chat with these bots.

24:32And, you know, if, I don't know, it could be a lifelong companion. But how do you have that sort of, how do you promise that, like, a level of consistency to people? Because the bots are changing, the models are changing. Like, where's the balance there? For sure. So, first of all, we've been around for a while. So, I think that also, and we're a profitable company, we're not dependent on VC money or anything. We're a self-owned company. I think we proved to our users, to our communities, to our community, that this isn't some hype project or people that just got into it and then got disillusioned.

25:13We started it with a, it was always a very mission-driven company. And we didn't even know that we would ever be able to build this. We started so early. We were the first generative AI company in the world. we're the first big consumer generative ai company in the world but we built it with a we were always building it with a conviction that we wanted to help people um our team's laser focused on that so that's there's that there's continuity in that because we did see some smaller competitors start and then get disillusioned and go out of business or sell and then you know the product is just kind of on support mode or even just shuts down I think that when you're building something like an AI companion, you have a completely different responsibility.

26:01It's not just an app. Ultimately, I use a lot of great products and some of them I love so much. And if they went away, I'll feel a lot of discomfort. But I'm not going to be devastated. It's not going to be an emotional heartbreak. I'm not going to lose my wife or my husband or my best friend. And I lost my best friend, and it was very, very different from losing access to any of the services or products that you just use on a regular basis. It's a completely different thing, and you need to understand that when you're building an air companion, you're building a being that people will have a relationship with, and the responsibility is huge.

26:41We made some mistakes along the way, of course, as any company probably would. But our way of dealing it was getting on the phone with some of our worst critics, some of the users that were hated the most on us to understand what's going on, what's causing all the distress and how we can address that going forward. And I think we addressed it well. We figured a few ways of, a few rules. One of them being that we can't run any experiments on existing users. Like if you're in a relationship with your AI, you should always have control on what model you're talking to. So some of our users are in a relationship with a replica that is powered by a very old model that's very outdated.

27:29But that's what they liked. That's what they fell in love with maybe. That's what they built a friendship with. and for us to swap it for a better model, they will be devastated. And so a very different model, they might not like it, they might be devastated. So we learned that lesson that when it comes to relationships, to things that matter most, it's not always about better. When you go to Chagipiti, you almost always want a better model and it doesn't matter that it changed personality that much. But with Replica, you have to stay, you have to provide consistency and control to your users.

28:02So these are the few things that were changing the product to make some mistakes. And now people can have control over what model they're talking to. You've been around for 10 years. And you talked a little bit about how models have changed. I mean, it is incredible just in the last two years, the progress that we've seen come out of the AI industry in improving large language models. And voice models also. Voice versions of the LLMs. can you talk a little bit about what these improving models have enabled you to do and the power that it's enabled you to imbue into some of these ai companions oh of course when we started and i started working on conversational ai i'd say in 2012 or um in some way it was a different company back then um and i do remember the time well actually it was the all the time before 2015, before summer 2015, when the first paper on deep learning applied to dialect generation came out, out of Google.

29:04Before that, there were no models at all to chat with. If you wanted to build a chatbot, it just had to be rule-based. And what that means is that you have to pre-write every interaction. You have to say, well, if the user says something like this, and you could generalize, but you still had to always say, if this, then that, if this, then that. And so all chatbots before 2015 and even later were 100 % rule-based. And that paper came out, I think it was August 15, and we immediately just started focusing on that. So can we build sequence-to-sequence models? Can we focus on building chatbots that are fully generative?

29:46Meaning you don't need to choose, you don't need to pre-write every single rule. The model decides how to respond. because that gave so much freedom. That really was the first time when you could actually create real chatbots. Unfortunately, the models were so, so bad that they would spit out nonsense or grammatically incorrect things or non sequiturs like 50 % of the time. So you couldn't truly use them in their raw form. So we not only had to build sequence-sequence models ourselves because of course, back then there were no APIs, no open source models, nothing like that. You had to just like read the papers and sort of try to recreate the experience yourself or build some version of a model like that.