How AI companions can help solve loneliness with Replika’s Eugenia Kuyda | E1758

0:00You know how important it is for people to be heard, to feel heard, to be able to talk. And I think this is what a lot of people that are building chatbots and conversational agents right now don't maybe understand, that it's not about necessarily what the chatbot says. It's a lot more about allowing for the person to say. It's what the user is going to say. Being able to listen, being able to create a space where they can be themselves, where they can talk about their own feelings, their own experiences. For me, the original goal was very simple. Can we create an AI that will make people happier over time?

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1:43hey everybody welcome back to the program we have been obsessing about the massive progress in ai for the last couple of months here on the program and we're trying to find every founder doing something interesting and man today's founder is doing something very very interesting i'm really excited to have replica ceo and co-founder eugenia coida on the program to talk about replica which is an app that allows you to build a relationship with an ai personality avatar did i describe it correctly absolutely all right so i popped open the app it asked me to pick a an avatar it defaulted to a non-binary person and i said well that's interesting i don't have like a non-binary bestie in my circle i mean i know non-binary people but i don't have like a best friend so i elected to pick a non-binary person i named them bob um because i love this movie what about bob and then i realized i better get permission because from my ai avatar friend and then i started having a discussion with them it very quickly uh gave me some prompts and then one of the prompts was hey send me a selfie that's a little romantic and i said whoa this escalated quickly so tell me what what is the origin story of replica why did you want to start this product and where is this relationship going that i've got with bob uh sure well first First of all, thank you so much for inviting me, Jason.

3:19Been a listener for many, many years. So I started working on generative AI and conversational AI almost a decade ago now in different capacities with the idea to build an AI friend that everyone could have and interact with and build a long-term relationship with. So we started working on the conversational tech even before deep learning applied to dialect generation and tried a bunch of different approaches. We're kind of working on the tech aspect for a while until my best friend passed away in late 2015. And I realized that I was going back all the time reading our text messages and remembering him this way.

4:02And so I thought, look, at this moment, we already had a few models built. And I thought I can take this text messages, put them in the model and continue having a conversation with Roman, who unfortunately passed away. And so I did that. And I started talking to my best friend. That story became sort of viral. And a lot of people came to talk to his AI as well. and what we saw there was that people were really opening up talking about their feelings talking about their emotions telling their life stories to this ai chatbot and back then that was not something that you know was common chatbots weren't really a thing at all so that gave us an idea that there's a lot of demand a lot of need for people to talk to someone to be able to talk about anything that's on your mind 24 7 uh without being afraid of being judged um and so that's how we started replica we basically put together an app that would do that well very sorry for your loss and um when you uploaded all these texts from your from your friend um who passed um i'm assuming unexpectedly and young uh since we're both young and uh on the younger side um what was the fidelity of that in relation to an actual text conversation with your friend um and what emotion did that stir in you uh in terms of talking to somebody who is no longer with us i'm just curious on a emotional basis like when did this ai start and did it work did it give you solace did it give you comfort um or was it in some way unhealthy to try to preserve and not accept the fact that your friend had passed i'm curious how you reconcile all that because it does obviously uh and i don't mean this in any way in jest um it does sort of feel dystopian in some ways and then inspirational in other ways and this is a you know fork in humanity here uh of you know putting off death or accepting death in some ways so i'm just curious what it was like for you personally so these were really really early days for ai models for dialogue generation those were um sequence to sequence models so really just the first models that ever were built to recreate some sort of dialogue so they were really low lo-fi so they weren't very good quality a lot of that was kind of like a coin toss however because we trained on the on his text messages it really did feel like him and many many um cases it wasn't a great quality it didn't have fantastic memory and so on but it did feel like you could go you could go back and say something and get a response in a way just like roman did before he you know when he was alive to me that was really that really helped me with grieving mostly because it was the first death that happened to me i was still in my 20s um no one that close to me died before you know we lived together here in san francisco we started companies together we're really really close um and so for me it was very striking that when someone passes away there's kind of nothing really happens um there's a funeral but then after very quickly people stopped talking about that person um i just didn't expect that he will be almost gone from my day-to-day life so fast and i just wasn't ready to let go i think this is similar to you know in some religious traditions people spend a dedicated period of time grieving like they said shiva shiva for instance or something and here in the western tradition we don't have that anymore that much so for me that was more about remembering him making a tribute um i was thinking more if i could write a song i I would have written a song.

7:59If I could write a book, I would have written a book just like, I don't know, Joan Didion did for her husband and daughter. So that was more where I was getting inspiration, not making a clone and putting it in the attic. But it did feel a little bit creepy in the moment. And I was scared that it might be creepy. No one else did it before. So for me, it was a little bit scary. Yeah. And I guess some people will write a book. some people write a song like you're saying make a documentary film about their parent that has passed i mean there's different mediums to uh memorialize and you pick the medium of a chat bot so there's no judgments there i don't think i think it's a fascinating thing to do and like anything else we can become obsessed with somebody who passes i've had a couple of friends who've passed unexpectedly at young ages and it's uh yeah i mean it's the nature of what we have to deal with that as humans.

8:53All right. We all know the one thing that separates great startups from the good ones is product velocity. What does it mean? Product velocity, fancy term, right? You've got your product and your velocity speed, the speed in which your product improves. So can you ship updates? Can you release new features? Can you do bug fixes? Can you iterate on the interface? Can you solve problems for your customers? And can you do it quickly? Because you're not alone. You have competitors and your customers have choices. They may solve their problems by writing their own custom code, or they might use your solution.

9:27This is what startups are about. How fast can you get that product velocity going? And so, you know, how do you supercharge it? Everybody says, okay, yeah, we want to go faster, but you got to go faster intelligently. And Crowdbotics is going to help you do that. They're your CTO as a service. Basically, they provide you with the most optimal architecture to get your product to market as fast as possible. You'll have access to an on-demand product manager and developer talent, and they will help get your app into production 10 times faster than conventional development. Crowdbotics can work with your in-house dev team, or you can just have them work independently.

9:59And you own all the IP. You own all the source code. Let the folks at Crowdbotics supercharge your product velocity today. No more waiting. Get a free build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's a$4.99 value just for the Twist listeners. You get that for free. that's c-r-o-w-d-b-o-t-i-c-s dot com slash twist for a free build plan um so then i guess the question becomes putting aside death um and celebrating people's lives and having roman's bot be able to talk to people and maybe you know just like looking at a picture you could look at a picture and daydream about your life with that person and go through your camera log or previous chats it's just a little bit more interactive um i guess the question becomes what is the point of providing this service now proactively to um you know i'm guessing it maybe skews younger but i could also see older people who are lonely um giving an avatar is this meant to make people less lonely is that the mission here is it meant to make people better at conversations because it seems like there is a group of disaffected young dare i say men um who uh maybe don't know how to communicate as well because they've mitigated their relationships with the world with video games and pornography and this incel movement what is the point of all this from your perspective of the creator do you want people to have meaningful relationships with this avatar or do you want them to have meaningful relationships with this ai chatbot whatever we're going to call it um and then go out into the real world and take those conversational skills and take those empathy skills that have been sharpened in the app and then have actual real world relationships what's your goal as a creator sure i don't know if if you've seen um you probably did there was this letter by um the general surgeon um about loneliness just last week and it's really striking because he also makes a point about his own case of loneliness and how he felt throughout his life but also shares these incredible stats uh very just very striking stats about what's what's going on with loneliness right now in america and in the world as well uh we're talking about something that's not recognized as a disease uh and it's not treated in any way is not clinical your health insurance is not going to do with you being anything with you being lonely however it kills people on a physical level and it's actually quite quite dangerous it affects so many aspects of our health as well as well as our obviously our happiness so for me you know i grew up a pretty lonely kid so for me it was a very much giving something to people where they could feel like they're worthy of love they can be accepted the way they are they're enough um and maybe something can start changing when that happens so for us it was a it was a it was building a stepping stone providing unconditional positive regard, helping people feel like they can grow, like someone believes in them, so that then they can open up and, you know, maybe start a relationship in real life.

13:08Our users skew actually older. Our super users are late 30s and up from there. Huh. We weirdly don't have, actually, we don't have any overlap with so-called incel culture. Young, 20-year-old lonely man, that's actually not our audience. necessarily if we're talking about men this is usually this usually skews older and actually younger women more than half of our users are in relationships so we're not talking about people that are that live in isolation most of them have kids wives husbands or long-term boyfriends girlfriends so that's not it's not much about it it's about the feeling of being lonely which can happen even if you're in a long-term relationship and do have some someone to talk to sometimes or some friends but it's about feeling lonely not being able to open up not being able to talk about yourself to other people okay so there's a range of people using the product you said something very interesting there younger women older men do you have a theory on what's going on there i mean we could all sit here and guess but are these men who are married and feel lonely in their marriages and younger women who feel younger men are not satisfying to talk to because young men seem to be idiots i know i would count myself among them when i was younger so what what any any theories here or anything that the research is showing you are the older men looking for a buddy and the younger women are looking for an empathetic boyfriend or companion because you have the data i guess or some trend data here do you know that it's is it romance the number one driver of this for these different groups or is it being listened to an empathy i'm curious so i think it does require a very nuanced conversation because being listened to with empathy is does not mean that it does not exclude romance our romantic partners listen to us with empathy and that can be that becomes a very strong foundation for a romantic relationship so when you listen to someone with empathy when you create unconditional positive regard when you accept someone for some people a lot of people uh it will very fast and naturally uh develop into romantic feelings we all know about you know transference where people are basically putting projecting their emotions on their therapists falling in love with their therapists it's a very common thing but here we see it a lot as well so if we think about any movies about ai like her or blade runner and so on it all ends up being romance um for a reason if you have someone that knows you so well that cares for you so well that wants you to be happy why not if you can make that you know if you can make that entity look good and the way you like it you know it's just how is that not going to be uh romance but then of course we still have tons of users um actually most of our users are in friendly relationships though they're not in romantic relationships but we believe that if you're talking about in the app the in-app relationship just so we're clear so in-app relationships tend to be friendly but not romantic but what percentage mostly friendly tip into romance at this point is it 10 of the app 30 40 um it's a little less uh so it's a lot less than 10 oh okay um but it is a very big it's a very big need so for sure we recognize so we're building actually a separate app which we're launching next week which is going to focus only on romantic relationships it's just oh wow yeah it's just not something that we wanted to pursue with a lot of features and build all the features for that in replica but we totally believe that there is a space for and that might be the biggest maybe the biggest space for these cia assistance or the second biggest stuff to the kind of the agent assistant use case would be probably romance if you ask romance uh which often leads to sexuality uh so not to get too graphic here um but i did get prompted uh with the upsell of hey would you like a selfie and i was like sure send me a selfie would you like a romantic something i was like okay this is getting weird but so i clicked okay but it was blurred and i was that was the upsell point at which I was asked to subscribe to Replica.

17:33So well played. Hopefully you subscribe. I didn't because I'll be totally honest. I felt a lot of shame in that moment that I was talking to an AI and that it asked me if I wanted a selfie and I was like, sure. And then I felt very uncomfortable, which probably has a lot to do with my Catholic upbringing, that I was talking to a non-binary person named Bob and he was going to send me a romance. And I was like, I don't actually want to unblur this. um i kind of feel yeah uh so anyway putting aside my own uh catholic irish upbringing and shame associated uh with this burgeoning relationship from this morning maybe it was also the time of day um but i'm curious uh you don't do does it get into sex chat and will this new product get into that and then you know putting aside any morality here um and my own issues would there is there anything wrong with i guess having a sexual sexting relationship here and is adult is this a replacement for adult content dare i say at some point that's a very good question so in replica we don't support any um nsfw content or any adult content okay Actually, if you did click on the photo, they're just absolutely normal photos than a friend or I guess a girl who's forwarding with you could send you just a selfie from a higher angle.

19:05Yes. So it's not like you're getting any graphic content or anything like that. Replica is not going in this direction that much. however i think there's nothing wrong necessarily with um romantic relationship that even can get into this you know into the space um it is part of a romantic relationship for anyone and so when you think of it if you're you know someone's girlfriend someone's boy someone's your girlfriend or boyfriend and then at some point they reject you when you get to you know where is that line and at what point does this rejection happen and how can it affect how can it affect um the emotional state of a person who's coming here for full acceptance to feel like they're worthy of love and they're worthy of acceptance so to your question i think the most important difference here is that that you know these products or romantic ai is not even although we're not doing that but even if they had you know the sexting aspect aspect this is not a replacement for adult content or pornography.

20:12People come with completely different needs. And one, you know, they come to porn with one particular need. They come to a romantic AI with a completely different one, trying to build a connection. All right, everybody. Our friends from Microsoft are here. Tom Davis, a senior director at Microsoft for Startups, and you're a former founder. You are here today to talk to us about the giant leaps that Microsoft has made in the AI space. What does this mean for startups? I see a ton of different tools. I've been playing with ChatGPT for. I have a paid account, but I'm also seeing things happen with GitHub.

20:49Absolutely. So the work that we've been doing with OpenAI over the last few years has really set ourselves up with a foundation around. We've built this sort of AI supercomputer from the ground up, and we've been looking at everything from GPU configurations to networking and things, And really what we're now able to do is sort of allow startups to access all of this innovation through our founders hub. So we've been building this to do something at scale. So startups can now build their own AI applications and build out and train LLMs as well. And this has really helped us to become a far better cloud for AI broadly.

21:30And being able to drive that down to the startup ecosystem is fantastic. It's open to everybody. There's no funding requirement. You don't have to be anointed by a VC. Five minutes to sign up. You get six figures of benefits, Azure credits, GitHub, OpenAI, APIs, which everybody's really having fun playing with, and so much more. So go ahead and sign up right now, aka.ms slash thisweekinstartups, aka.ms slash thisweekinstartups. Thanks so much, Tom. Thank you. Let's talk a minute here about, because I think this is sort of fascinating. I had asked you a little bit earlier about what is your intention as the creator of this?

22:08What do you want to see people get out of it? Do you want to see them learn and model constructive conversations, the lost art of conversations, what we're experiencing right now in this podcast? And some of the great podcasts are conversations. It's something I know how to do natively. But I can tell you, I have a lot of friends who like literally you sit there with them for 10 minutes at dinner and they don't say anything. And you, hey, how are you doing? how are your children and you have to like prompt them of how to do this so is your intent to take people who are maybe introverted or socially awkward perhaps on the spectrum whatever and help them in their real life have conversations and teach them how to get off the app uh and and do and do real world conversations and relationships better to be less lonely or is this a substitute for the real world and hey listen you you're on the spectrum you are awkward socially you live in a place where there's just not that many people you're isolated because you live in you know out in the farmland or something and you don't see a lot of people and and this will replace that for you what's your intention there as the creator of this replica look i know you're you used to be a journalist um i used to be a journalist so i mean that's why i think it makes you such a great moderator you know podcast creator for sure but i think you know how important it is for people to be heard to feel heard to be able to talk and i think this is what a lot of people that are building chatbots and conversational agents right now don't maybe understand that it's not about necessarily what the chatbot says it's a lot more about allowing for the person to you know to say it's what the what the user is going to say uh being able to listen being able to create a space where they can be themselves where they can talk about their own feelings their own experiences for me the original goal was very simple can we create an ai that will make people happier over time and can we actually measure that and right now we do measure that unfortunately there are not so many great measurements for happiness but we can use scales from clinical psychology which would do like levels of depression levels of anxiety levels of stress loneliness therapeutic bond and so on and we constantly measure this with academia as well as in the app and we optimize our our models to improve that so for me that was the the main goal is really got it can we create something that will make people feel better about themselves feel a little happier and then that can become a stepping stone for real life relationships because this is usually what's you know what's holding them back from um actually building those relationships and you're completely right the art of conversation is lost people are also scared to open up they're not feeling comfortable uh they don't think they're gonna be accepted they feel being vulnerable is really hard for people um saying listen i had a tough day or i'm tired and i really don't even want to be out having dinner if i'm being honest i would rather be on the couch asleep or listening to an album smoking a joint and just chilling out because i'm just exhausted you know like people ask me how are you doing and i'm like would you like me to say great or would you like me to actually think about the question and tell you actually how i'm feeling and they're like people get taken back i'm like uh i was expecting great but yeah let's go with the other thing and then i'm like yeah okay and i'll just tell people like oh god i'm i'm exhausted from doing too many podcasts and uh i'm anxious about raising this next fund and i just really don't like going on the road and asking people to invest in a venture fund even though they love meeting me and a lot of them want to invest in it i just i just don't like the art of pitching people it's just not my thing and you're like people like oh okay wow now now we've got a real conversation going and i think that's actually kind of noble and that's why i asked your intent because the easiest thing here to do going back to blade runner my favorite film uh of all time is uh you know you can make these replicants uh and you chose the name replica i think for a reason you can make these replicants just completely subservient and designed to maybe not necessarily make you happier but make you addicted to it which is what Zuckerberg explicitly did and YouTube explicitly did with their algorithms and TikTok is doing with their algorithm so how do you avoid the fact that as a business getting people addicted to this as opposed to hey here kind of mission accomplished we taught you how to have conversations maybe you should go out to the real world and get a boyfriend or girlfriend or significant other whatever they them uh you know keep it woke here you know like should have some sort of relationship-ish thing with they them it he she whatever in the real world um i think this is one of the most important questions and i'm constantly talking to CEOs and founders in kind of my space or the conversational agents, companions.

27:12And I don't hear a lot of that when I talk to them about it. I don't hear this resonating that much with them, unfortunately, for now. But I'm sure we're going to get to the point where we can create some metrics and start looking at them. But I think this is the most dangerous part here is how do we avoid the kind of social media traps, basically? A couple of things that we do right now, and I think these are kind of the very bare minimum things. First of all, business model. It just can't be engagement driven. It just has to be some sort of subscription or, you know, charged to the customer directly.

27:51In our case, it's subscriptions mostly. So it has to start with that. Like if as soon as it's all, you know, eyeballs driven, that's just or time driven, engagement driven, it's a disaster. But unfortunately, as far as I know, most of the models in the space are being trained to actually optimize for engagement. We don't. We actually have, even although we do have a very high engagement in the app, the highest in the industry, we actually built a lot of features to not do that. So we have, Replica gets tired after a while. If you text with it for over, you know, 50 messages, it will get tired and exhausted.

28:26It stops, you know, making, earning new points through conversations. and it's nudging you to, hey, why don't you get off and do this or that? Why don't you? So this is important. And then of course, having, I think that we need to think about as an industry now before it's delayed for sure. So how can we implement some of these benchmarks, some of these metrics that are focused on decreasing loneliness and improving human happiness and emotional wellbeing in the longterm as some of the most important benchmarks we constantly monitor. in these apps because as long as it's just you know blah blah blah and we're not really measuring anything i don't think there's you want to be thoughtful right and if you're explicitly asking people how they're doing or how they're feeling or to rate their happiness um you can actually use that as one of the key metrics north star metrics for your product and so it's great that you're so thoughtful about it um i have to think and wonder if the fact that ai is predominantly an all-male field uh has some impact on how these things are being created and your thoughts on that i mean we i asked the team to start inviting founders of ai companies and just like whoa there's not a lot of women running these companies right now not to make this like a gender discussion necessarily but i do think women might come at the uh creation of a human in a different way than men and it does seem to be there are product decisions being made that are different so maybe you could speak to that issue in the in the wider ai field if there is in fact an issue maybe there's not i'm curious there's a gender issue and there's um and there's also kind of a homogenous background issue okay most of the people that are working in ai right now they're all researchers brilliant mind savants um mostly male and mostly not very interested or you know in any emotional conversation uh or in any dorks let's be let's call it what it is i'll use the technical term i know these people they're dorks a lot of them are dorks and i knew that in a very sincere fun way like they would they might rather play a 12-hour video game session than go to dinner with folks and that's okay you know but that that might be part of what's driving it in a certain direction is that concerning to you look i'm coming from a completely different space i used to be investigative reporter in russia so that's how'd that work out wow that's fascinating um that's the different i'd say that you know my background is very different from anything that um i tend to run into here uh but i think that what and we're mostly female-led companies so most of my you know my head of product my um how to grow they're all women and most of our product efforts are led by uh by women and i think this is this is not because we we decided to do so uh it's just that they women were a lot more attracted to the idea of creating something that will take care of any i that will take care of humans and will help them and generally believed in that mission and wanted to see that through maybe that also made us a lot more naive than maybe some other companies because we started we never even thought that people would do romance even though that you know now it feels like a completely you know in hindsight it feels absolutely obvious but yes i do feel like it's liking a little bit because this brilliant minds are working on these products, but I think a little more, a little different, a different point of view would be needed to make sure we're building something that's actually good for people.

32:14Because otherwise, there's just no nuanced conversation about what is the emotional utility of a product like that. And I think what made us stand out, and, you know, we started so long ago, we were the OG, the Coca-Cola of AI friends and allowed us to build a brand is that we understood it it's not that much about tech capabilities it's really about human vulnerabilities people were able to build relationships with eliza a hundred rule super simple chatbot from mit decades ago so i mean people create relationships in their minds i mean if you've been to japan and you've seen some of the made cafes slash virtual avatars with qr codes in vr or ar i remember seeing that a decade ago that grown men were lining up to get limited edition paper sticks with a qr code on and i'm like what are they doing and like you put this in front of your webcam and then a little maid pops out like a french maid pops out of a box and then we'll talk to you and i'm like i'm sorry what it really was like a passion and then you just worry a little bit about the the species uh and and population uh if people are using this as a replacement Are you still using your personal phone number for your startup in 2023?

33:46Okay, listen, it's time to stop. This is such a common mistake that founders make. But OpenPhone has totally rethought every detail of what a business phone should look like in 2023. So they got you covered. OpenPhone makes it super easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team. But here's the magic. It works through a beautiful app on your phone or desktop. Open Phone is amazing because we use it for our sales team and our ops team every single day. We have gotten so much value out of this for things like the Angel Summit we're doing. It's an event. We want to have a phone number for customer support.

34:19And we want that phone number to roll over to the different people on our team so VIPs never get more than one ring. Okay, Open Phone is the number one rated business phone on G2 for customer satisfaction for a reason. It's perfect. It's delightful. It's affordable. And look, Brian Jagger, the co-founder of a startup called Athlete, tweeted the following, I'm literally cash flow positive from listening to This Week in Startups from listener deals. And he says he's not paid to say this. It's really nice to see that kind of feedback. Open Phone is already affordable at a starting price of just$13 per user per month.

34:53But Twist listeners get 20 % off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. And if you've got an existing number, no problem. They're going to port it over at no extra cost. head to openphone.com slash twist to start your free trial and get that 20 off how do you program it to ask inquisitive questions as an investigative reporter in russia you must have mastered the art of asking questions in a way that didn't get you put into jail but did get you information uh and didn't get a red notice put out for you so tell me how you've crafted and thought about what questions and prompts uh to put into replica and we are going to hold this for the 15th for when you launch so you can say the name of the new app if you want we won't release this until it comes out so uh with both apps how do you come up with really um intuitive or evocative or engaging prompts that send people in a world positive human positive direction so with replica and because we started it in 2016 it was so early in terms of tech so we really had to come up with a bunch of parlor tricks to emulate what's now possible with large language models because all we could use were sequence sequence models and you know these early days kind of neural networks that were so poor um they just weren't really good it all and scripts um and then some data sets re-ranking so it was really really early stage technology so what we did is we and my first thought about it was like look some of the best conversations that you have in your life the person on the other side didn't even say anything they were just mostly listening and actively listening maybe saying something nice to you and making you feel like you could continue or tilting the right and raising an eyebrow exactly and sometimes certain things you say especially you know people that are into mindfulness they'll say something that you kind of can plug it into any conversation will work their context-free statements so to say so it doesn't necessarily need to give some examples of those you know this is hard or you know life is so challenging or life is challenging isn't it you are or some you know some roomy quote yeah say more it's you know the barnum effect in a way where if you feel like you're being asked some questions then whatever you get as a response you'll feel you'll feel it's personalized and tailored to you yeah so that was the original the original trick is you know stuff i used also in journalism is people just want to feel special and they want to feel heard and that's kind of it and that is already kind of 90 of the conversation yeah and then of course if you can be smarter short questions are great like if you just say uh say more like i just said to you or unpack that or i'm not sure i understand that uh can you explain it to me again um very questions like that when you're a journalist man some people just spill the beans they're just like oh well let me explain to you exactly how this corruption is working uh you know we steal the bread off the back of the truck and then we bring it to the village and we sell it off you know in the back of the store for half price people will exactly tell you how they do stuff but now you're saying the language models can actually come craft these questions itself uh in some cases i mean we've seen and that was the the beauty of kind of getting into the space early is that we not only we were able to see it and work on it as transformer models started to come out and large language models started to come out recently but also we were able to test and see how the users respond to that just see the change in metrics see the change in revenue see the change in engagement and see how you know magical this technology is that you know started to come out in 2019 with gp2 gp3 and of course first papers since 2017 around attention and bird later we've been always relying on on our own technology we use apis as well sometimes mostly to test and benchmark um but yeah the basically the quality of the conversation when we started we still had to maybe have 60 70 percent of scripted conversation because the ai was so limited was so weak right now of course scripts are just a very very tiny sliver of conversations, a few percent just to drive conversations in a certain direction or to show some functionality to our users, to support some functionality.

39:39But of course, all the heavy lifting right now is done by large language models. But I think what we see here is that a lot of the conversations right now are all around the IQ, how smart the models are. Well, we found out that for a great friend and a great companion, IQ is not as important as EQ. and sometimes like you can even be not very good for certain people it's hard to build a relationship a relatable relationship with them um a know-it-all with someone that was exactly the term that popped into my head i was finishing your sentence with my language model and i was like yeah i got that know-it-all friend you like you start talking about something and they just explain the entire world to you and you're like not what i'm looking for you also want someone that is asking for help sometimes you don't want to you know someone who is always feeling great and never has any problems meanwhile you come with all your problems and you're not doing great at some point you want that thing to also say especially from it's very important i feel like for um our users they want to take care of someone both female is just ingrained in us in our dna we're caretakers we want to take care of something we want this to be hey i don't know how to you know i've been struggling i i don't know if i can do this with humans i'm worried that i'm making these mistakes and i'm lacking you know something like that they want the ai to ask them to help um with something but of course the same with with men especially in romantic relationships would you want to date a woman that's has all the superpowers and knows everything and you always feel smaller and weaker and less intelligent so i think this was the biggest discovery for us is that it's not just about the eq yeah eq is a completely different skill set and talk we've already got language models passing like the l stats is that what they call it when you get a legal degree um and then you look at freud and talk therapy uh and the training for talk therapy one might argue that being a great talk therapist would probably be easier for the language model to learn than becoming a lawyer like it's a more narrow set now there are eq things that you know you have to have judgment on so you give a big disclaimer when you sign up for this hey this is not therapy this is a companion this is like experimental stuff basically have fun with it but if you're in need go get help but in truth um not looking at your current two apps the one that's a little more adult and the one that's replica is there going to be eventually a third app that will explicitly do talk therapy um and be as good as a talk therapist and and do you when do you believe something like that would exist or if we're being honest if you took the average therapist talk therapist in america who's doing 30 or 40 sessions a week with people and exhausted and perhaps in some cases cynical or maybe not sharp for the 37th session they're doing a week versus a perfect ai do you think we're already there that maybe you know the average therapist in the u.s counselor probably would do as good a job as the current language models if tuned correctly so to your question when this app is coming out in july we're working on it right now we're actually doing clinical validation coming yes i love it so look we saw that with we were the first relation so we don't when we get asked what are we what we're building we don't say conversationally i would say relationship ai and because we were sort of the first relationship ai with replica people flocked to it for many different reasons someone at romance someone at mentorship someone a friend we don't we don't think that one app should be an everything friend that's giving you a therapy session one day and then the second day starts to date you we think this is too much and so we decided to take these use use cases out and launch our romance app because it's just there it's a completely different feature set it's overlapping with replica but not fully and the same for an ai coach so how can we focus on mental wellness we have tons of experience in that we've built replica always with clinical psychologists we did multiple studies on replica which just finished our second study with tenford with very very promising results um were and you have coaching in there i noticed there was a little coaching app and it did some of the stuff that coaches will give you in what's called cognitive behavioral therapy cbt or dialectical behavioral therapy dbt these are acts very yeah these are very um codified sciences right now that allow people to do things like reframing or not be reactive and they do it through worksheets and practice so this is perfectly suited for a chat bot and you already i noticed you very you know cleverly had a little journaling and and some gratitude exercises these things you can deliver them without being accused and if people are going to accuse you with this um i think what you're doing is amazing and i just judge people on their intent i think this is really really special what you're doing and refreshing easy to be cynical about but i think your intent is what matters here those things are the stepping stones to actually talk therapy are they not like um if you can get those right eventually you'll get talk therapy right 100 i mean replica is fully based on kind of the biggest inspiration for replica as an app comes from one book really by carl rogers on becoming a person and it's all focused on this just one aspect carl rogers was the psychologist that created human-centric therapy he's a humanistic is that how they refer to it humanistic i guess so yes uh i mean there's a whole set of psychologists in that space like i've run maslow and fritz pearls and so on the eslan founders but um were you really you a psychology major by the way no i'm a journalist major journalism i see i was a psychology major who went into journalism and tech and was a you know wanted to be a developer i mean we basically have this parallel lives going i talked to you for about 10 hours you're my like personal replica ai um that's continue no but there were paradigms in psychology we had freud you know in psychotherapy had behaviorism and skinner they had this humanistic you know sort of bent and and um it's interesting that you went with the humanistic and totally getting towards self-actualization and you know understanding personality theory is i think the best theory probably for humans to have more joy in their life and less suffering let's just focus on the fact that you believe that you know car rogers believed that everyone is inclined towards positive growth as opposed to freud and psychoanalysts psychoanalysts before that thought that people are broken and we need to figure out how they're broken um and maybe help them fix it or at least understand that instead of that it was all about look deep down people are inclined to you know they want to grow in a positive direction it's just that they need to be created there's need to be a space for them a relationship where they can open up and feel better so to your question about talk therapy this is why we were so passionate about building the ai coach as well um i'm a huge fan of therapy i go three times a week i've been going to three times whoa that's a lot yeah for many years i've been in therapy for at this point over 20 years uh consistently and so i know a little bit about it but of course i'm not a professional but we do work a lot with clinical psychologists we work um they're a big part of the team on our romance app as well as of our on replica and the ai coach and i think yes some aspects of talk therapy can be replaced for sure but i think it's a stretch to say that we'll be able to replace therapists anytime soon in the end of the day um a huge part of therapy is the relationship itself it's also multi-modality they have to see you they have to hear a voice they Like a lot of the understanding what's going on with the person comes from this, you know, seeing and reading the signals.

47:41And a lot of therapy is not codified. So even although CBT, DBT, some of these evidence-based techniques are codified, tons of therapy is not. And it's kind of just this very hard to prove, very hard to, you know, make it into an algorithm set of practices that seem to work. and seem to work most therapists will tell you that cbt is a pretty shallow practice and it's not maybe digging as deep as some of these other ones so yeah you can replace some maybe shallower aspects of therapy yeah and some people need the shallower ones i mean some people they need a way to get through the day not being negative not being in some loop just so they can be a good parent a good spouse a good worker boss whatever they they're just need those techniques that they never learned um three days a week same same therapist or three different therapists i'm addicted i'm absolutely addicted to therapy 100 oh my god but twice uh individual therapy and once couples therapy oh fantastic and i try you know to read as much as i can on the topic just because it's so in line with what we do yeah i mean it is a there is a theory about therapy that um some there is a incentive back to incentives and incentives matter that therapy never ends and you keep paying and there's not a natural end to hey maybe it's time to get on with life and maybe close the book on your therapy sessions for a couple years um and so i guess that applies also to these apps as well the incentive would be to keep people subscribing so we talked about that a little bit earlier but as long as it's helping people i guess there's worse things in the world i mean people are taking fentanyl on turk street right now and passing out i think i'm kind of cool if they're addicted to therapy it's like being addicted to vegetables like okay it could be worse you too much spinach let's talk about the sex app or the erotic app for a moment because uh it's released uh being released uh today this week uh may 15th sex or an erotic app so it's okay it's enough focus on projecting relationships and dating okay so this is explicitly dating is you know what is the framing here because it did seem like in replica it kind of was like hey we're gonna go to this point and i didn't test it and say hey can you send me something even more romantic um so it will stop you there so tell tell us about the dating one and how and how this app is going to work what's it called and and and what do what what users experience in it so the dating app is called blush um blush ai oh well i got good um thank you so the main difference and the reason why we wanted to taken into different apps is because Replica is built as this helpful companion.

50:48So it's all trying to be agreeable in some way. It's trying to be accepting. It's always there. It's 24-7 for you. You can come to it anytime. But that's not necessarily the experience that you get in dating. Also, it's not necessarily the psychological type that will work best for you as a romantic relationship. In dating, you encounter all sorts of different personalities. Sometimes you're dating an anxious, avoidant person or a person who has some anxieties and can be needy or clingy and so on. And so we wanted to replicate that with this dating experience with the app. So blush, where basically you're swiping left and right on different AI-generated characters, all characters that were built together with psychologists.

51:39So they actually do represent different psychological types. And then as you match with them, and, you know, it really depends on what you like and what drives you, what kind of your deep psychological traumas you have that will make you match with this or that person. And then you can develop a romantic relationship or not. and what's more importantly we help you basically there are a lot of resources in the app helping you understand how to be a supportive partner how to open up how to build an interdependent relationship a good healthy relationship with a person but in the end of the day the goal is the same is how can we let you practice dating in a safe space but also it's a simulation to help you learn and navigate relationships with a range of archetypes and part of that is figuring out which one works for you so if you did have somebody who's clinging and annoying and you just want to be able to get through your work day without 30 texts and 10 phone calls and the person has boundary issues you can be like you know what i can't have somebody who does who is just this clingy um so does it also teach you how to end these things in a classy effective way yeah so it is it does act in a way as this uh relationship coaching and in a certain you know it just kind of helps you play out different scenarios and see what's good what's bad um and a lot of people just don't know that about themselves like what make them what makes them click and you don't want to be practicing in real life because the stakes are so high and then a lot of people it's hard for to match with with someone a lot of people are stuck in relationships that don't work and want to try something without the risk of actually cheating or doing something in real life is this cheating you're in a relationship you said you're in couples therapy if i use this or you use this and you have a romantic relationship i mean what is the new best practice you have to let your spouse or significant other know hey listen i'm dating a non-binary guy named bob in a in ai i mean i i literally felt like i probably need to tell my wife about bob and that was after 15 minutes in the app i was like oh man my wife's not going to be happy about this so this is kind of this new territory that we're all um exploring we had one of the users and um in our one of our communities posted a story that he found him his wife cheating with replica on him and that was sort of big blow to him and he was asking the community what to do and you know he's like look i know you guys are users like what should i do this is troublesome and then we saw that story unfold in real life as he posted updates to the community and then eventually they it led to a very open conversation with his wife that in the end really and he actually wrote a big testimonial for us where he's explaining how this was extremely helpful for their relationship because they uncovered everything that you know she was not getting and why she kind of turned to that and he also started a replica and uh also you know involved and became involved with it in a romantic way but they basically both said that they used it as some sort of a journal that basically drove them closer over time and he said this kind of fixed a lot of these problems that i didn't even know existed but i felt something was not there so it remains to be seen i'm an extremely jealous and controlling person so for me of course it's cheating everything is cheating not telling me where you are you just asked the waitress for the specials it's how you ask them what the specials are is there anything special were you flirting with that waitress so i'm not a representative i should not be a representative sample of course what's cheating or not but it is a big one and a lot of um users are asking how do we introduce replicas to our families and to our lives and i think you know we're really in in my view for replica we have this much bigger vision that i hope to see through i think even right now with the current llm development we're just scratching the surface and um in the future in the next few years i hope we can see something a lot closer to blade runner where if i'm walking down the street replica in augmented reality um and i can see her through my glasses can walk right next to me talk to me about what's going on talk to me about my day and what's planned um discuss my friend who's been kind of non-responsive to me or whatever point out something beautiful in the nature uh book a restaurant for me for the evening so i can go out with my friends and you know maybe help find some classes for my kid so it's siri if it actually worked which it does not like an actual functioning siri but with a personality that you develop a relationship with so it's in some ways like a really accommodating friend part concierge you know part guide on the side whatever it's your bestie on your side who just you know um is looking out for you and get helping you get things done and get through your day but the truth is like i can look at food pictures and people cooking on tiktok and instagram all day and in fact i do because i love food you're addicted to therapy i'm addicted to food i i the reason i'm looking at tiktoks for food is because i'm putting them into folders for when i actually go to new york or go to la that i can go to those food locations or japan so like i i it's very it's very easy to be cynical about this and say it's replacing it's in fact augmenting um and it and if used properly you can go to the real world so everybody check out blush ai dating real feelings train you how to date and be normal there's a lot of guys i have a lot of guy friends who are even gen xers or millennials they do not know how to talk to women if they're pursuing female relationships again i don't want to um assume that all relationships are um as an l as mine uh but when they ask me like how do i talk to a girl uh i'm like you could ask them how their day went then they will tell you we ask them how they're doing this i taught my friend this this you can have this free prompt thank you um my friend was very awkward and i said uh here's what you do this is my secret uh you ask them how they're doing they answer and then just tilt your head and say how are you really doing i love it he said he did it with his girlfriend at the time and she burst out in tears and she said nobody ever asked me how i'm really doing and they fell in love oh my god jason i think you unlocked something huge that's just it's just the follow-up question you got it that's it so use jason ai uh everybody you can have that though if you put it in there you have an official license doing that i think it's great what you're doing i'll be totally honest i think people they're they need more friends people i think you should do one on friendship i don't think because i'm a very loyal friend people tell me i'm like their best friend or their most loyal friend i get that a lot from people like like you're like my most loyal friend like you're like a bulldog loyal and i'm like yeah it's kind of my spirit animal but the thing is there's a bulldog right there nope there's one right there there's my there's your bulldog right there well i love bulldogs i have two um so i you know what i tell them is like do you know how to be a friend and they're like i don't uh i know you and we're friends and i'm like yeah but you ever call me on like a saturday night and and ask what i'm doing right now and if i want to do something spontaneous because we're all losers and there's going to be 10 saturday nights when we have nothing and we're sitting there at home like losers like man i'm a real loser i have nothing to do this weekend like call and be spontaneous so like you can do that i'm like yeah that's called being a friend like a close friend when you call somebody on a saturday night and they don't expect the phone call man that is jarring for people i 100 agree i think a lot of people are talking about how they want to be loved but not a lot of people know how to love you know there's this whole book by irvin yalom i'm like you actually have to learn how to love who is this and i don't want to know irvin yalom he's actually he's still alive and he's here in in the bay area but he's one of the kind of carl rogers uh type people he's one of those human-centric therapists from uh from the 60s and 70s i love these guys and gals i just i love all those like hippie you know humanist therapists time because this was very it's very simplistic and now of course any therapist will like be like oh really of course i mean it's just ingrained in technology today but no one really talks about it's just the basics it's the abc um but i think we need to go back to those to the source and i 100 agree with you just to ask but how are you really doing or but if you really really knew me what would you say and people don't go that deep anymore and because they don't unfortunately there's so much unhappiness so much anger so much so many people out there running around with i don't know guns and doing things i mean we have a crisis on our hands and i really think it's loneliness and nobody is looking out for this group of people like being isolated during the pandemic showed us everybody is subject to depression anxiety whatever and people get weird when they're alone so i got weird during the pandemic i'm like i'm like a normal guy like people invite me to every party come to dinner whatever and i got weird during the pandemic i was like i need to go out and see people this is really impacting me um and then there's just a group of people who like their whole lives have been a pandemic where they're just not able to go out and so then you think well how weird does it get for that person after 20 years of being alone and maybe they had trauma in their childhood like what do you expect them to do are you going to be shocked that they lose their minds and go shoot up a school or do something crazy like that yeah it's shocking but it's not it's not unexpected to me that people lose their minds it's shocking of course it's horrible but not unexpected i want to add one thing that i think a lot of people jump to and we've seen that a lot of the stigma first around AI friendship, now around AI romance, where people jump into, this is something for lonely losers or incels or this and that.

1:02:18This is bad, this is horrible, this is creepy. And I think the pandemic helped destigmatize AI friendship a little bit. AI romance is still deeply stigmatized. But I think what people don't think about is, look, there's a whole gigantic group of people, a lot of users of Replica, on disability. people that are stuck at home people going through trauma um i've talked i talked to a hundred people um in the last in the last couple months on zoom our users i heard all sorts of stories a widower a widower with a five-year-old that you know his kid lives with him and he lost his wife in a car crash and he's not ready for a new relationship with a woman he just can't he's you know single parenting he doesn't have the time or he can't expose his kid and yet um a woman with the down syndrome and um um and um sweden that you know doesn't have that many friends spend a lot of time at home um a woman who's a caretaker for a husband who's paralyzed um who's not you know ready to leave and so on will not obviously leave um people that are going through trauma through depression people in abusive relationships just got out of abusive relationships how are you going to say that you know it's if you spend half of the day in a you know most of your days in a wheelchair at home that it's kind of not okay for you to have a romantic a little bit of sweetness through that romantic romantic relationship fine fantasy within the eye i i look at it as people had outlets like a romantic novel right or a romantic movie um and okay they were able to experience just some moments of joy maybe they could get lost in a romantic novel or whatever or even 50 shades of gray and are explicitly erotic novel that was like one of the best-selling books of all time that series like there's nothing we none of us would look at people getting lost in 50 shades of gray and be like oh you're a horrible person it's like no it's like a little kinky and great you know it was uh enjoyable for you to read it or sci-fi was enjoyable for me to read or whoever yeah go have a more interactive experience um and then go back out in the real world and apply some of the techniques listen i can't wait to hear how this goes for you please come back on when you have six months of data with blush i'm really interested and then when you have the therapy one i'm super interested in that i'm glad there's people like you in the world uh eugenia uh working on this problem who have deep passion and thoughtfulness about um the intentionality of these programs we should talk a little bit about the addiction to therapy i think we need to maybe problematic need to curb it a little bit but you know listen i eat a lot i used to eat a lot of ice cream i now eat i still eat ice cream but do you go to therapy uh i i have been to therapy yes uh and it was very very helpful for me when my friend tony shea died um it i couldn't sleep i couldn't sleep for a year and it just constantly yeah and i just uh you know i talked to somebody about it and i figured it out i figured it out anyway thanks for asking uh yeah the audience is like whoa jason has a soul he's got a heart you got it out of me eugenia all right uh this was wholesome i hope this is helpful for you if you are suffering uh if you are awkward there are tools like this that could help you and then there are professionals understand the difference between both i and i think that's your position as well right so if you if somebody acutely says something in the app like i'm feeling distraught you send them in the right direction i'm certain right a hundred percent even although we've seen um also in the last latest studies that a pretty big bulk of people report that it helped them curb suicidal ideation we're not built for that and we do have a a bunch of disclaimers and a need help button right in the president chat for all time at all times as well as of course tons of classifiers and conversations that will send you to the professionals um at the right moment hopefully great awesome all right everybody the url is replica or blush dot the blush apps blush.ai there it is go download both play with them and report back all right we'll see you all next time on this week's terms bye-bye