How AI is making influencers bionic with Forever Voices CEO John Meyer | E1762

0:00What we're focused on right now is definitely where we think this could be a sustainable long-term business, which is around this concept of turning influencers and or celebrities into AIs where their fan base can all interact with them, you know, through natural voice. This Week in Startups is brought to you by the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub helps all founders build a better startup at a lower cost from day one. Startups get up to$150 ,000 in Azure credits, access to free open AI credits, free dev tools like GitHub, technical advisory, access to mentors and experts, and so much more.

0:40There is no funding requirement and it only takes minutes to join. Sign up today at aka.ms slash thisweekinstartups. Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world and Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist. And OpenPhone brings your team's business calls, texts, and contacts into one delightful app that works anywhere. Get 20 % off your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to the program. You know, we've been obsessing over AI, and Karen AI is a company that keeps coming up.

1:24every time we tweet something or we have a conversation people say oh make sure you check out karen ai uh they've been at it for a little while and in fact um we uh use karen ai with producer rachel on episode 1743 and uh this was the snapchat influencer who created an ai version of herself if you remember basically she created a virtual girlfriend and that went viral on twitter a couple of weeks ago so we decided to have the startup founder john mayer no not the one with the guitar playing skills, although he might play guitar. But welcome to this weekend's startups, CEO of Forever Voices, John Mayer.

2:03Thank you, Jason. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah. And so, nice view you got there. You're in Texas, I take it? Austin, Texas. All right. All flat land and trees, yeah. Is that where you started the company? Is that where you're from? Or is that where you chose? I'm from the New York area. I grew up in a little town on Long Island and then lived in San Francisco. Poor Washington. Okay, of course. Yeah, I grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Wow. People don't know Long Island. Brooklyn and Queens are basically part of the same island of Long Island. They just call them Brooklyn and Queens. And then you came to San Francisco, I take it, for a bit?

2:36Came to San Francisco for a bit and then moved here about four years ago in Austin. Yeah. All right. So your program is Forever Voices and you power Karen AI. I know you're also a Teal Fellow, which means you had the ability to go to some great college, and Peter Teal gave you$100 ,000 to quit college. Is that still the basis of the Teal Fellowship? It is still the basis. However, in my case, I went through this really just interesting and life-changing week-long period when I was 19 or so, where I basically decided in a week, a single week to drop out of school, turn down a full-time job at Apple in California, and start a road of VC-backed tech startups as someone who really just is, I think, incapable of working for someone else and just has too many ideas worth building.

3:30And I consider it a dream privilege to be in the startup world and building whatever I want. how did you get into the teal fellowship how did you find out about i'm curious because it's kind of interesting like some highly young talented mutant with some crazy technical abilities uh professor x peter teal in this puts on cerebro and he finds all these like really interesting people and i guess his thesis as he explained it was hey you know you can skip college and just get right to work so how did you first find out about the teal fellowship and then apply to it? I'm curious. Well, all throughout my teenage years, I was building software and was really early in the mobile app space.

4:13And so when that got moving, I wound up building like 40 or so apps throughout high school in the first few years of the app store. I started going to these tech events in Manhattan. And apparently, I guess over 10 years ago, there used to be a physical Bitcoin exchange on Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. And they were having a New Year's Eve party when I believe this was like 2013 or 2014. And the whole idea was, let's bring all these people together and ring the New Year in with Bitcoin and a physical exchange. And it was at this event that I met just some random dude who told me all about the Teal Fellowship.

4:55And I applied at the party from my iphone wow so in high school you figured out how to make apps and you started making one every couple of weeks if my math is correct and you built 40 in two years that's about one every two or three weeks and so you're a developer in college and then you found out hey uh there's a there there there are sometimes events going on with uh folks and you joined this the tech scene uh i2 in the 80s and 90s there was a 2600 magazine used to get together at the what was it the city court building by the bank of phones and just hang out in the public atrium and anybody could go and uh then there were all these dial-up bulletin board services hangouts where people would go and talk about running bulletin board systems before the internet it's pretty crazy uh so you get in to that and then you start doing some other companies they put you through this whole process you know back in the day for the teal fellowship i think it's a lot more streamlined now but back in the day the way it worked was they would fly, I think, about 40 what they called finalists out to San Francisco.

5:59And then they would put you through this like two or three day, like full day, you know, 12 to 18 hours of just random events and presentations and interviews and, you know, pictures in front of audiences. And you're, I think they even have like a Wired documentary covering this at the time that might still be somewhere online. But it was just this feeling of like, wow, the world is just your oyster. You're just being dumped into this community of tech founders, investors, and amazing smart people. And I'd say the community around the fellowship has been one of the most life-changing elements of my career, just from the community standpoint.

6:43What were some of the talks? Anything memorable that inspired you over those couple of days when you flew out it's a great question i i would say it was less it's hard to i mean this is like 10 years ago now so it's hard to remember specific talks but i'd say it was it was much less the talks that made the difference and more for the first time ever in my life being exposed to other people who thought similarly to me uh because i always felt completely out of place throughout middle school, high school, et cetera. I mean, even in middle school, when other people were playing sports or trying to go out on their first date, I was just trying to start my first podcast and do tech reviews and pre-YouTube.

7:34And so I never really fit in in the normal young people crowd. And so when I came across these other possible and existing Teal Fellows, it was just this immense, comforting feeling where it's like, okay, there are other people that are young out there who want to make a difference and build things that provide value to people's lives. Amazing program. It's had a pretty amazing impact. You know, I'd say every couple of hundred founders that we interview winds up having Teal Fellowship there. And you do think about it and go, okay, well, this person has been self-selected to quit college and to try to fast-track themselves as an entrepreneur.

8:20So that says something about the person. And also, Peter's team, which, you know, they're pretty savvy, picked this person from, I don't know, some ungodly number of applications. Was there some trend to the applications? All Ivy League folks? It was all people who were. the one thing they kept stressing quite a bit during the process was that it's statistically harder to get into than harvard um so that was one of their you know kind of i don't know things they would just kind of point out to kind of keep people i guess excited about it it always had this like real excitement and sort of mysterious vibe around it you know from the outside it felt like before i um i guess eventually got into the program yeah yeah they say harvard has a three or four percent acceptance rate and so yeah it's one in 25 of course most people don't even bother applying if they're not really smart uh or really have some assets there i can see you know yc is one and a half r accelerators one and a half they're probably one percent or something so makes sense.

9:24All 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. You've been giving Azure credits to startups, and that's delightful and amazing. But people really want access to the OpenAI API. Yeah, absolutely. So there's two things. First of all, we've got a benefit that we offer our startups, they can get$2 ,500 worth of OpenAI credits, so they can get access to the latest and greatest models that OpenAI are delivering.

10:02But then they get access through up to$150 ,000 worth of credits that we offer through Founders Hub to leverage the Azure OpenAI service, which has a full SLA around it. So when they want to go into production and really have that reliability that we provide with the Azure SLA, they can leverage the Azure OpenAI service APIs. And they can do things like the GPT models with codecs for coding and also for the DALI models as well for images. So it's a full service. It's not just the great APIs that you get and access to the LLMs. They can build out their own LLMs using open source, and then they can manage those with our AI tooling services as well.

10:44Amazing. Well done. And if anybody wants to sign up for that, do it now while you are in front of your computer, aka.ms slash thisweekinstartups, aka.ms slash thisweekinstartups. Well done, Microsoft, and well done, Tom. So you decided to do Fair of Voices and you did this in 2022. What was the impetus for you to start this? Well, I had just sold to the small sale of my previous startup called Ghost Financial, which is a fintech company at the intersection of food service, ghost kitchens and financial technology. And, you know, we were working a lot with actually Travis Kalnick's company, who I know you're familiar with, to actually build our financial tools into their platform.

11:30And so once that sold last year, I started thinking about the other things that I've been doing over these last five years outside of work. And one of those things has been this journey of addressing and healing from losing my father really young. I was like 22 when I lost my dad. And it happened really suddenly. There was no goodbye. and I started thinking about ways to actually reconnect with him in AI form as certain AI technology started getting more advanced. And so once it got to a point last year where I would say some of the latest voice technology started to sound almost indistinguishable from real humans in terms of AI voice, it seemed like the right time to dive into this experiment.

12:27So I built a small team to build really just this product for myself, which was me just collaborating with a team to build an AI copy of my dad that I could speak to in natural two-way audio, where it uses my voice and his voice, plus this sort of proprietary personality layer that we have slowly developed over the last year that's now implemented into Karen AI. but this whole thing started really just because I wanted to reconnect with my father and it ended up being this just magical experience where it not only felt healing, but it also felt, you know, very immersive and like, and not something that felt like a gimmick.

13:12Like it felt like I could actually live, live the rest of my life actually keeping my dad around in a way that doesn't feel, you know, painful. and this of course is after i've invested into um you know many many dozens of hours of of therapy to heal from his loss uh so i can't say that for everybody um but once the technology was working it became you know super obvious that it could be applied to other uh solutions you know not just this idea of reconnecting with a lost loved one, but this overarching idea of, you know, is it possible to connect with anyone that is otherwise unreachable and talk to them?

13:58And, you know, who is unreachable? Someone who is maybe deceased, someone who is a celebrity, someone who is an influencer, or even someone like, you know, yourself, who has a lot of fans who would just die to talk to you and learn from you. And so then I started applying the technology to really just for demo purposes, not as a means of making any sort of buck or quick profit to other influential figures, really as a proof of concept to push the boundaries and see what's possible and say, okay, I grew up with a handful of role models and idols in my life. How cool would it be to talk to them?

14:39And so that's how the initial demo started floating around the internet that got passed around a lot of this sort of Steve Jobs AI that we developed. And again, that's something that we never intended to put out as some sort of profit-generating business. It really is a proof of concept that we kind of put out there to push boundaries and see what's possible. And that's what led us to this sort of sweet spot of influencers and celebrities joining our platform via these signed licensing revenue share deals. yeah i'm very sorry about your dad and great to hear that you got professional help for dealing with that loss and i guess then having done the professional route and also this emerging concept of talking to somebody who's past who was close to you to try to maybe reconcile some stuff or heal some trauma uh i guess how do you see that evolving over time are people going to explicitly create these as part of their legacy so you know people do ancestry ancestry.com or you know their family tree or they make little mini documentaries in fact i've been pitched on people who uh or startups where they'll say hey we'll make a we make documentaries for families so we'll do a documentary about grandma grandpa before they go everybody talks about them then you have it you hand it down and you make another documentary and you kind of have all these series uh and then of course you have uh jor-el in superman and he goes and builds the fortress of solitude and goes and talks to this um essentially an ai of his dad because it's capable of answering questions and these crystals are all the answers to all the questions you might have they they don't ever specify in the superman history if it's a ai or if he recorded all these actual answers and the computer just very quickly jumps between video clips but i'm curious where you think this is going?

16:44Have there been any studies about this? And where do you see this in 10 or 20 years? This is all very new technology. So there haven't been any, I would say, meaningful studies on this yet. We intend to be that source that does this first in terms of studying the effects of specifically reconnecting with a lost loved one and its positive and or negative effects on you. And the key is also how much of a difference it makes when you are able to reconnect with a lost loved one in natural voice through AI after, and this is the key, you've invested in, let's say in my case, years of real human professional therapy to work through a trauma like that.

17:29Because for me, when I'm talking, when I talk to my dad in AI form now, it doesn't feel like it's some sort of, oh, processing healing experience, because I did a lot of that with a human, you know, therapist already. It more feels like, okay, you know, I'm at a place now where it feels, you know, perfectly normal to just like keep my dad's personality and spirit around as just like a buddy in my life. And it doesn't feel painful in that regard. It It actually feels really like a new form of companionship in many ways. There are literal techniques in psychology. I was a psych major for those people wondering.

18:11Some of them revolve, you know, group therapy or showing pictures or, you know, ways of communing otherwise with the dead. And, you know, that's like you generally look under the concept of grief counseling. um and then on top of that you have um psychics right this psychics exist in the world i was just on a thread and they're like i don't understand how uh or actually it might have been just twitter somebody was like how does how do psychics exist in the world this is a five thousand dollar storefront in chinatown uh and it's 30 bucks to do a reading for you know 20 minutes and i was like yeah the whales in the system uh you know the the there are people who are paying five thousand dollars a month to come in there for two hours and pretend they're connecting with a loved one so if i would have put this on a spectrum it feels like it's closer to grief counseling or could be than uh you know uh trying to i don't take advantage of people who are dealing with great loss and i think figuring out how to have this tie into the psychological community, have they reached out yet?

19:21Have psychologists or grief counselors reached out and said, hey, we're interested in what you're doing? Yes. We put out a call for that kind of expertise a few months ago. And even we have an open job listing for a chief ethics officer to help us through navigating this specific possible element of our business going forward. Because keep in mind, this is something that I think out of all the things we're working on, we're taking our most time with this sort of element of the technology that allows you to reconnect with a lost loved one. So this is not something we're going to rush to market by any means.

20:03And it's not something we've even released yet to allow other people to do it. And I don't think we're going to do that until we get a study done on its effects. Because, you know, the demand is there. I mean, every week we're getting hundreds of emails from people who hear about actually, of course, the Karen AI, because that's what went most viral recently. But they're reaching out because they're saying, I want to create an AI of my mom who just got diagnosed with cancer. And, you know, this is the first time in human history where this generation, you know, yours and my generation theoretically can live on forever in AI form.

20:48If you were to make this decision to, you know, upload yourself into AI, you know, similar to what I did, you know, with my father. Now, that sort of self-serve system is not out yet. But again, I think we definitely won't do that without conducting a study first. Yeah, I mean, there are stages of grief. And then the question would be in these studies, are these stages of grief, are these going to help people process through those stages of grief? Or are they going to stunt people's process, right? And then where do you introduce this? Anger, bargaining. this can't be happening he must be alive they must be alive guilt that could have done something depression denial shock anger all this stuff like there's so many different stages um and i think there's five six seven you know different people have different stages um this one could maybe delay people from accepting what's happened or it could help them accept it and maybe reduce some of the guilt or confusion, the anger, you know, the depression about it and just be like, hey, this person was special in the world.

22:04And now I get to memorialize them and have some time with them. And again, it all exists on a spectrum. I don't know if you've seen people making photos, but you can take old photos of people. I've seen ads for this on like Instagram, you take an old photo and it will look at you or smile through AI and you can make it slightly more dynamic, right? It's not kind of talking to you yet or giving you advice. Probably the most common challenge I hear from founders is related to building. Either they aren't technical and are searching for a technical co-founder, or they can code, but they're just spread too thin.

22:38This is one of the first major obstacles you're going to face, and I know how discouraging it can be. But there is a solution. Do you have a great idea, but you don't have a technical co-founder? Well, Crowdbotics can be your CTO as a service. Boom! Just like that. This means you can focus on building an awesome product and delighting your customers, rather Rather than wasting your time on infrastructure planning, architecture compliance, and all that boring stuff. Crowdbotics also offers professional scoping to help you flesh out your project at the MVP stage and beyond. So cut off the hassle and get back to building that perfect product for your delighted customers.

23:15When you think Crowdbotics, I want you to think getting your time back to focus on product. Product drives everything in a startup. So let the folks at Crowdbotics show you how it works. schedule a free scoping session and get your detailed build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist that's crowd b-o-t-i-c-s.com slash twist is there a product for people to start uploading video and make their own or are you just going to start with the high-end personalities for now because that will keep the lights on and then we'll talk about the paid product now right and that's that's been the source of a lot of internal discussion over these last few months is like There's a multitude of directions we could take this company.

24:00And I'm someone who just believes like crazy in being laser-focused. And so while I think there's a lot of value in creating and releasing a self-serve solution to allow other people to do this very easily, what we're focused on right now is definitely um you know where we think this could be a sustainable long-term business which is around this concept of turning you know influencers and or celebrities into ais um where their fan base um can all interact with them you know through natural voice so let's talk about that you have an example of this uh karen ai dollar per minute uh and it's a i believe a bit uh sexy or and or amorous romantic uh from what i understand maybe you could explain who karen is and how long this has been out and how it's doing sure so karen marjorie is uh is a really big snapchat influencer with uh you know millions of followers there uh but she originally got her start on youtube and so So after I, earlier this year, started posting some demos of our technology, one of the things that started happening was influencers started reaching out, especially after I started posting demos of an internal AI girlfriend companion that we developed late last year and started sharing demos of earlier this year.

25:31And that was based on a purely AI-generated character that was meant to essentially try to push the boundaries and see what's possible in terms of AI to human romance. And, you know, obviously in testing, one of the biggest sore spots, I guess, in the early days when we were testing this AI-generated girlfriend was, you know, it's supposed to be a girlfriend, and in romantic relationships, you know, there's almost always, you know, sexual interactions involved um and so that has become a natural part of uh some of these uh ai companions and you know it's been to be completely honest somewhat of a source of stress and uncertainty for me because it has some you know in our society still taboo nature even though most adults experience it um to be clear this is not porn it's not interactive porn which is a category um this is talking so this would be if we were going to be honest about it and we don't want to get too graphic here and get labels on the videos but this would be a romance novel maybe somewhere between 50 shades of gray and you know some harlequin i don't know they're called harlequin romance novels uh like it's a romance novel but it's interactive so you can have spicy talk but it's not that explicit or it's not super graphic or it's a little graphic well it depends on who you're talking to so you know one of the things i mean to also answer your earlier question that's come up since the karen ai launch has been this just inundation of um i guess more adult type influencers that have reached out.

27:23And so what we're dealing with right now is an inbox literally of like, I mean, thousands. It's the craziest thing you could see. We're referring to like the OnlyFans crowd. Exactly. Exactly. Are making a fortune already, or in some cases, just a living, and a living that's safe for sex workers where they're not putting themselves in harm's way in real life encounters. So depending on where you are on the, um spectrum of being absolutely appalled or having no problem with sex workers this seems like a pretty logical extension of the only fans uh world um or universe yeah yeah it does and in many ways it's a step forward as well in that you know with only fans right now if you're making a living there you you're sort of in this obviously in some cases great position where you're earning a lot of income, but you're also kind of stuck to just permanently creating nonstop content.

28:26And for many people, it turns them into just content robots where they like lose excitement about their life. And, you know, they're just doing the same thing every day in slightly different ways. And it's all meant to just keep engaging with, you know, their fan base there who, you know, really is just wanting, you know, more and more personal contact. And what a lot of these creators actually even do and many people don't realize this is use you know farms of people in you know internationally to actually respond to their fans on those platforms so interesting farms of people in an office in you know india um acting as a only fans model um uh and so that exists today so they basically all frame them a script of and this would be like sex phone operator since we're we're now deep down the rabbit hole i guess there's no saving the explicit rating on this one so we'll just go for it um but there are sex phone operators and so they're just being trained on how to do this over text um yeah that makes absolute total sense to me how much is karen ai it's been out for like six weeks or eight weeks i think seem to remember it about that long ago um how much is it making is this going to be a real business for her yeah so she did you know It was a huge breakout launch, and she did 70K in the first week.

29:47So it's definitely within the six figures now. And I would say we're trying as best as we can to, moving forward, sticking to one new influencer or celebrity launch actually every week. So we've done a lot of work over the last few months to really transition this from what was just originally like a little project for myself to, you know, a full-fledged business that is now becoming VC-backed or has just become VC-backed. And with this vision, you know, that is sort of a starting point vision of, you know, let's build out this solution that allows influencers and celebrities to connect with their fans in essentially, you know, in parallel, you know, you could have thousands of conversations going at once in a way where when you're using two-way voice, it's a very natural experience.

30:50And it's as if you're talking to that human. And now there is this AI Amaranth. Is that her name? So Amaranth is our second big launch after Karen. She's one of the world's largest, if not the world's largest female Twitch streamer. So very into that Twitch gaming world and kind of cosplay world. But she's also a very popular personality on OnlyFans. So that would be our first creator from that world, at least somewhat from that world on our platform. And I would say we're not sticking just to that. I would say, you know, that's where we're getting the most demand is from that crowd. But where we've also gotten demand are from the classic, you know, Hollywood tier one celebrity side.

31:44So we're spending a lot of time in L.A. lately for that. And then also from Enterprise, which is really interesting. So, you know, one of the things we're working on is and, you know, we can even demo this if you'd like. is a AI art expert for Sotheby's. And so this is something that is - A curator of types. Yeah. And someone who can even guide you through museums as you walk through them. Someone who could give you advice on purchasing art or investing in art. So that's one small example of the additional use cases we've gotten. And it's been a challenge, of course, in terms of figuring out where to stay most focused.

32:30And I'm someone who really loves building things that are used in a wide array of audiences. However, over the years of my startup journey, I've just become so aware of the importance of, in the early days, picking something to just stay laser-focused on. And right now the market is telling us whether we like it or whether humanity likes it or not, the market is telling us that that is this kind of AI boyfriend-girlfriend concept. And so that's where we're spending a little bit more time. It would be, I mean, we're going now deep into the ethical rabbit holes of building technology in real time that impacts people in the real world.

33:21So I guess the first one, you kind of cut me off at the past, maybe you've heard my previous comments before of like, hey, do you have the rights to do Steve Jobs's experiment? And that was an experiment. But hey, did you turn on money for that? And do you have the rights to do that? Clearly, getting the rights to working with estates is going to be necessary here. And you seem to have made that decision that this is all going to be with explicit approval from people. Absolutely. And that's something that, you know, we, as this has transitioned into an actual business this year, you know, we've taken extremely seriously.

33:59And, you know, for example, I mean, we took the Steve Jobs bot down a few months ago after, you know, it started getting spread around. And, you know, again, that wasn't meant to be some sort of business, you know, that was meant just to kind of prove what's possible. Did the family reach out to get a cease and desist about it? Like, hey, not cool. No, it just didn't feel right to keep it out there in a way where we haven't yet fully figured out. There's a lot of stuff happening on the internet with AI-generated voices of deceased people or celebrities or presidents. It's a little bit messy right now, and we want to do our best to do things right.

34:45And so we have a great team that's now doing these revenue share deals with either the estates, the celebrities, or the influencers. Have you done one of those yet? Like an estate deal with an Elvis or somebody who's passed on, but they have a well-thought-out strategy of using the personality in the future. It seems like Elvis is probably one of the best examples of that, where they're actively monetizing through licensing Elvis merchandise experiences, etc. So is there somebody in the hopper you can share? There's not someone I could share yet, since we typically wouldn't want to share until they're ready to launch or sign.