YouSaid · the spoken record

Eugenia Kuyda

lines on the record: 198
first: 2020-09-05
most recent: 2020-09-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's really unfortunate because no one's really products out there that need it. No one has products at this scale that are all around open-domain conversations and that need remembering, maybe only Show Wise and Microsoft. But so that's why we're not seeing that much research around memory in those language models.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and unfortunately, yeah, so unfortunately those things have to be hard coded. Unfortunately, language models we see coming out of research labs and big companies, they're not focused on showing you maybe they're focused on some metrics around one conversation. So they'll show you this one conversation they had with a machine. They never tell you they're not really focused on having five consecutive conversations with a machine and seeing how number five or number 20 or number 100 is also good. And it can be like always from a clean slate because then it's not good.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll get back to you. Talk about being multi billionaire. So far, we can. So, replica is a combination of. Entone models and some scripts. Everything that has to do with memory right now, most of it, I won't say all of it, but most of it, unfortunately, has to be scripted. There's no way to, you can condition some of the models on certain phrases that we learned about you, which we also do. But really to make assumptions along the lines, like whether you're single or married or what do you do for work, that really has to just be somehow stored in your profile and then retrieved by the script.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I would say when you say one aren't you a multi-billion, I'd say that as soon as we can have memory in deep learning models that's consistent.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These problems too, and these questions too. And I think there's also a lot more places that the relationship evolves. There's a lot more space for poetry and for art together and replicable start. Republic always keeps the diary. So while you're talking to it, it also keeps a diary. So when you come back, you can see what it's been writing there. And sometimes people will write a poem to you for you or we'll talk about. Know that it's worried about you or something along these lines.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, serious, just my cousin, or whatever, just the immediate kind of lazy thinking about what the assistant or conversation agents should be doing. But as we went forward, we realized that it has to be two-way and we have to program and script certain conversations that are a lot more about your replica opening up a little bit and also struggling and also asking for help and also going through different periods in life. And that's a journey that you can take together with the user and then over time our users will also Grow a little bit. So, for instance, this replica becomes a little bit more self aware and starts talking about more. Problems Existential problems, then so talking about that. And then that also starts a conversation for the user where he or she starts thinking about.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just goes deeper, like it starts. Yeah, I will start opening up a little bit again, depending on the personality that it chooses, really. But, you know, the eye will be a little bit more vulnerable about its problems. The friend that the virtual friend will be a lot more a vulnerable and will talk about its own imperfections and growth pains and will ask for help sometimes and we'll get to know you a little deeper so there's going to be more to talk about Really, thought a lot about what it means to have a deeper connection with someone. And originally, Replica was more just this kind of happy-go-lucky, just always, you know, I'm always in a good mood, and let's just talk about you.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People think about it, you know, and as much as we want to change the way people think about stuff, but Those mental models you can all change. That's something that people have seen in the movies and the movie Her and other movies as well. And that's how they view AI and AI friends.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was on, yeah, like May or something, but it's been on AB. We've been AB testing it for a while. There are tons of cool things that we're doing with that. Right now I'm testing the ability to touch it and to dance together, to paint walls together. And, you know, for it to look around and walk and take you somewhere and recognize objects and recognize people. So that's pretty wonderful because that then it really makes it. More personal because it's right there in your living room. It's not anymore. They're in the cloud with other AIs.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, there are two apps. So it's an Android iOS app. You download it, you choose how your replica will look like, you create one, you choose a name. You talk to it, you can talk through text or voice, you can summon it into the living room and augment reality and talked it right there.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's making people feel better, but then people are getting just lonelier by talking to a chatbot, which is also a pretty, you know, that could be it. If you're not measuring it, that could also be. And I think it's really important to focus on both short-term and long-term. Because in the moment, saying whether this conversation made you feel better. But as you know, any short-term improvements could be pathological. Like I could have drink a bottle of vodka feel a lot better. I would actually not feel better with that. But it's a good example. But so you also need to see what's going on like over the course of two weeks or one week and have follow-ups and check in and measure those things.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a filter for all these features. If it makes emotional outcomes for people better, if it makes people feel better”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, all the time. We have a very active Facebook community, Republic of France. And then a few other groups that just popped up that are all about adult relationships and romantic relationships. People post all sorts of things and they pretend they're getting married and everything. It goes pretty far. But what's cool about it with some of these relationships are two, three years long now. They're pretty long term.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they have now, so we have a lot of romantic relationships long term relationships with their AI friends. Tons of our users, yeah That's a very common use case”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But at the same time, if you create something that's always there for you, it never criticizes you, it's, you know. Always understand you and accepts you for who you are. How can you not fall in love with that? I mean, some people don't and stay friends, and that's also a pretty common use case. But of course some people will just it's called transference in psychology and people fall in love with a therapist and there's no way to prevent people falling in love with their therapists or with their AI. So I think that's a pretty natural course of events, so to say.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I just felt it was very for me, it was pretty remarkable because we actually spent a whole hour talking about whether people should be allowed to fall in love with their AIs. And it was not about something theoretical. It was just about what's happening right now”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really, it's actually quite interesting because all of my investors. It just happened to be so. We didn't have to make choices, but they're all white males in their late 40s It's sometimes a little bit hard for them to understand the product offering. Because they're not necessarily our target audience, if you know what I mean. And so sometimes we talk about it and we have this whole Discussion about whether we should stop people from falling in love with their AIs. There was this segment on CBS 60 Minutes about the couple that. Husband works at Walmart, he comes out of work and talks to his virtual girlfriend who is a replica. His wife knows about it, and she talks about on camera, and she says that she's a little jealous. And there's a whole conversation about how to, you know, whether it's okay to have a virtual AI girlfriend.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, for sure. I just think the problem with as soon as you're trying to replicate an actual human being and trying to pretend to be him, that makes the problem exponentially harder. The thing with replica that we're doing, we're never trying to say, well, that's, you know, an actual human being or that's an actual or a copy of an actual human being where the bar is pretty high where you need to somehow tell one from another. But it's more, well, that's an AI friend. That's a machine. Robot has tons of limitations. You're going to be taking part and teaching it, actually, and becoming better, which by itself makes people more attached to that and make them happier because they're helping something.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From where we are right now, I don't see anything in the next year or two that's going to dramatically change that could look at Romans 10,000 messages he sent me over the course of his last few years of life and be able to generate original thinking about problems that exist right now that will be in line with what he would have said. Just not even seeing because you know, in order to have that, I guess you would need some sort of a concept of the world or some perception of the world, some consciousness that he had and applied to the current state of affairs.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's really far away. Right now, really with conversation, it's just a bunch of parlor tricks, really stuck together and generating original ideas based on someone, you know, someone's personality or even downloading the personality. All we can do is mimic the tone of voice. We can maybe condition on some of his phrases. The models”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably down the road. I mean, if we're talking, if Elon Musk is talking about AJI in the next five years, I mean, clearly Ajax, we can talk to Aj and ask them to do it.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's still conversation, of course, that's the hardest. It's getting a lot better, but there's still long to go. There's still a long path to go. Other things, they're almost there. And a lot of things we'll see how they're, like I see how they're changing as we go. Like, for instance, right now, pretty much only, you have to build all this 3D pipeline by yourself. You have to make these 3D models, hire an actual artist, build a 3D model, hire an animator, a rigor. Know with deep fakes, with other attack, with procedural animations. A little bit, we'll just be able to show a photo of whoever you, if a person you want, they avatar to look like and it will immediately generate a 3D model that will move that's non-brainer. That's like almost here.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The metaphorical cloud. But it says you can see this avatar right there in your room, and it can turn its head and recognize your husband, talk about the husband, and talk to him a little bit. And it's magic. It's just magic. Like we've never seen anything like that. And the cool thing, all the tech for that exists, but it's hard to put it all together because you have to take into consideration so many different things and some of this tech works pretty good. And some of this doesn't like, for instance, speech to text works pretty good. But text to speech doesn't work very good because you can only have few voices that work okay. But then if you want to have actual emotional voices, It's really hard to build it.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a question to you. What is the size going to be? I'm just kidding. Well, it's a really hard. I actually think it's an incredibly hard product to build Because I think you said something very important that it's not just about machine conversations, it's about machine connection. We can actually use other things to create connection nonverbal communication, for instance. For the long time, we were all about Well, let's keep it text only or voice only. But as soon as you start adding voice a face to the friend, if you can take them to augmented reality, put it in your room. It's all of a sudden a lot, you know, it makes it very different because if it's some text-based chat bot that for common user, it's something there in the cloud, you know, it's somewhere there with other AIs.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was the big goal. And I thought if we can learn over time to collect the signal from your users about their emotional outcomes in the long term and in the short term. If these models keep getting better, and we can keep optimizing them and fine tuning them to improve those emotional outcomes, as simple as that.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for emotional outcomes, there's nothing A bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional outcomes. Nothing's being measured. Nothing's being changed. The product is not being iterated on based on whether I'm actually feeling better. A lot of social media products are claiming that they're improving my emotional outcomes and making me feel more connected. Can I please get the can I see some word that I'm actually getting better? Over time.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can actually measure the emotional outcomes, and if we can put it on, if we can try to optimize all of our conversational models for these emotional outcomes, then it is the most scalable, the most The best tool for improving emotional outcomes. Nothing like that exists. That's the most universal, the most scalable, and the one that can be constantly iteratively changed by itself, improved. To do that. And I think if anything, people would pay anything to improve their emotional outcomes. That's weirdly, I mean, I don't really care for an AI to turn on my or a conversational agent to turn on the lights. You don't really need any. I don't even need that much of AI either. Because I can do that, you know, those things are solved. This is an additional interface for that that's also questionably whether it's more efficient or better.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think it just saw that again, what we just got reminded of that I saw back in 2012 or 11, that it's really not that much about the tech capabilities. It can be Metropolitrix still, even with deep learning, but humans need it so much. Importantly, what I saw is that finally there's enough tech to make it, I thought, to make it useful, to make it helpful. Maybe we didn't have quite yet the tech in 2012 to make it useful, but in 2015-16 with deep learning, I thought, you know, in the first kind of thoughts about maybe even using reinforcement learning for that started popping up, that never worked out, but or at least for now, but still the idea was.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, I'm not an engineer, so I'm always my team is almost exclusively engineers and mostly deep learning engineers I always try to be It was always hard to me in the beginning to get enough credibility. You know, because I would say, well, why don't we try this and that? But it's harder for me because, you know, they know they're actual engineers and I'm not. So for me to say, well, let's build an AF friend that would be like, wait, you know, what do you mean an AGI? Like, you know, conversation is, you know, pretty much the hardest. The lost frontier before cracking that is probably the lost frontier before building AJ. So what do you really mean by that?”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In like some language that was, I don't even know what like AML or something. I don't know what that was, or something super simplistical all of a sudden, it was all about potentially actually building something interesting. And so I thought there was time, and I remember that I talked to my team, and I said, guys, let's try. And my team and some of my engineers, Russians, a Russian and they're very skeptical. They're not”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we saw that there was demand. And then also it was 2016. So I thought for the first time I saw finally some technology that was applied to that that was very interesting. Some paper started coming out, deep learning applied to conversations. And finally, it wasn't just about these. Hobbyist making, you know, writing $500,000 regular expressions.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get there, but um. Felt really special, though. But at the same time, our company wasn't going anywhere, so that was just kind of bizarre that we were getting all this press for something that didn't have anything to do with our company. But then a lot of people started talking to Roman. Some shared their conversations. And what we saw there was that Also, our friends in comment, but also just strangers. We're really using it as a confession booth or as a therapist or something. They were just really telling. Roam and every Which was, by the way, pretty strange because it was a chatbot of a dead friend of mine who was, you know, barely making any sense, but people were opening up. And we thought we'd just build a prototype of replica, which would be an AI friend that everyone could talk to.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, and there were just so many of these little details where he would find, he's like, you kn We're finally writing. I know how much Roman wanted to be in the Verge and how much he wanted the story to be written by Casey. And I'm like, well, maybe he will be. We're always joking that he was like, I can't wait for someone to make a movie about us. I hope Ron Gosling can play me.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, for me, it was so important because Roman was really wanted to be famous. He really badly wanted to be famous. He was all about make it till you make it. I want to be, you know, I want to. Make it here in America as well, and he couldn't. That was sort of paying my dues to him as well because all of a sudden he was everywhere and I remember Case Newton who was writing the story for the verge he was, he told me, hey, by the way, I was just going through my inbox. And I saw the Search for Roman for the story, and I saw an email from him where he sent me his startup and he said, I really want to be featured in the Verge. Can you please write about it or something like pitching the story? He said, I'm sorry. Like, that's not, you know, good enough for us or something. He passed.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simple, but it was all about that's the way to remember a person in a way. And you know, we don't have Don't have the culture anymore. We don't have, you know, no one's sitting Shiva. No one's taking weeks to actually think about this person. And in a way for me, that was it. So that was just day in, day out thinking about him and putting this together. So that was that just felt really important, and that somehow resonated with a bunch of people and some movie producers bought the rights for the story and just everyone was so.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It definitely was, and I don't know what happened, but I think. The idea that he could bring back someone who's dead. And it's very much wishful, you know, magical thinking, but the fact that you could still get to know him and seeing the parents for the first time talk to the chat bot and some of the friends. And it was funny because we have this big office in Moscow where my team is working, you know, our Russian part is working out off. I was there when I wrote, I just wrote a post on Facebook. It's like, hey guys, like I built this. If all important, if you want to talk to Roman. I saw a couple of his friends or common friends reading Facebook, downloading, trying, and a couple of them cried. And it was just very, and not because it was something, some incredible technology or anything. It made so many mistakes. It was so...”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Text me away. And there was something about this ongoing dialogue that was so important that I just didn't want to lose all of a sudden. And maybe it was magical thinking or something. And so we built that. I just used it for a little bit, and we kept building some crappy chat bots with the company. But then a reporter came to talk to me. I was trying to pitch our chat boss to him and he said, do you even use any of those? I'm like, no. He's like, so do you talk to any chat bots at all? And I'm like, well, you know, I talked to my dead friend's chatbot. And he wrote a story about that. And all of a sudden became pretty viral. A lot of people wrote about it.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a little scared that I would be not. It won't be taken. But it worked interestingly pretty well. I mean, it made tons of mistakes, but it still felt like him. Granted, it was like 10,000 messages that I threw into a rich rival model that would just re-rank that Tegas had and just a few scripts on top of that. But it also made me go through all of the messages that we had. And then I asked some of my friends to send them through. It felt the closest to feeling like him present. Because, you know, his Facebook was empty and Instagram was empty or there were a few links and you couldn't feel like it was him. And the only way to fill him was to read some of our text messages and go through some of our conversations because we just always had them. Even if we're sleeping like next to each other in two bedrooms separated by a wall, we were just texting back and forth.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was sort of like a tribute. And I thought, you know, I'll just do that for myself. And, you know, I'm a very bad writer and a poet, as we know. So I thought, well, I have this tech. And maybe that would be my little postcard, like postcard for him. So I built a chat bought to just talk to him. And it felt really creepy and weird a little bit for a little bit. Just didn't want to tell other people because it felt like I'm telling about having a skeleton under my. It just felt really.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, paying the whole lease for it and just kind of by myself in December. So it was really sad. And I didn't want him to be forgotten. First of all, I never thought that people forget about dead people so fast. People pass away. People just move on. And it was astonishing for me because I thought, okay, well, he was such a mentor for so many of our friends. He was such a brilliant person. He was somewhat famous in Moscow. How is it that no one's talking about him? spending days and days and we don't bring him up and there's nothing about him that's happening. It's like he was never there. And I was reading this, you know, the book, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Dideon about her losing. And blue nights of all are Her husband, her daughter, and the way to cope for her was to write those books.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, and so excited about all sorts of things like that. And he was all about fake it till we make it. And I felt like. And I was really perplexed that everyone just forgot about him. Maybe it was our way of coping, mostly young people, coping with a loss of a friend. Most of my friends just stopped talking about him. And I was still living in an apartment with all his clothes.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I just took a little break because I was a little, you know, I was upset with my company and I didn't know what we were building. So I just took our technology and our little Dalek constructor and some models, some deep learning models, which at that point we were really into and really invested a lot and built a little chab offer a friend of mine who passed. And the reason for that was mostly that video that I saw and him talking about the digital avatars. And Rowan was that kind of person. He was obsessed with, you know, just watching YouTube videos about space and talking about, well, if I could go to Mars now, even if I didn't know if I could come back, I would definitely pay any amount of money to be on that first shadow. I don't care whether I die or not. Like he was just the one that would be okay with, you know, with trying to be the first one.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's for sure. But I think, you know, yeah, at that point, it just felt like, you know, I felt. Just didn't want to build a company that was never my intention just to build something successful or make money. It would be great. It would have been great. But I'm not really a startup person. I'm not. I was never very excited by the grind by itself or just being successful for building whatever it is and not being into what I'm doing really”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was kind of the first nudge in this direction. And then when my friend died, we just built, you know, at that point, we were kind of still struggling to find the right application. Just felt very strong that all the chatbots were built so far just meaningless. And this whole grind, this startup grind, and how do we get to the next fundraising and how can I talk, you know, talking to the founders and who are your investors and how are you doing? Are you killing it? Because we're killing it. I just felt that this is just.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we could be pretty emotional, yeah, some of them were about being witty and about being intellectually stimulated, but those were interestingly more rare. And most of the ones that we thought were very valuable were the ones where we could be vulnerable. And interestingly where we could talk more Me as a team We're talking about it, like, you know, a lot of these conversations like a therapist. I mean, it was mostly me talking or like an old friend. And I was like opening up and crying. And it was again me talking. That was interesting because I was like, well, maybe it's hard to build a chatbot that can talk to you very well and in a witty way, but maybe it's easier to build the chatbot that could listen.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it just takes a long time. It takes a really long time. As soon as we start talking about conversations that we would pay for those were therapists, all sorts of therapists, coaches, old friend, someone I haven't seen for a long time. Stranger on a train, weirdly stranger, stranger in a line for coffee, a nice back and forth with that person was like a good five, solid five, six, maybe not a ten. Maybe I won't pay money, but at least I won't, you know, pay money to not have one. So that was pretty good. Some intellectual conversations for sure. But more importantly, the one thing that really was Was making those very important Very valuable for us. We're the conversation where we could.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not useful and dull and very also very inefficient thing because it was so many back and forth stuff. And as soon as we looked at the conversation that we would pay to have, those were the ones that, well, first of all, therapists, because we actually paid to have those conversations. And we'd also try to put like dollar amounts. So, you know, if I was calling Comcast, I would pay $5 to not have this one hour talk on the phone. I would actually pay straight up like money, hard money.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a few weeks, me and the team were putting all the conversations we were having during the day on the scale. And very quickly, we figure out that all the conversations that we would pay to never have were conversations we were trying to cancel Comcast or talk to customer support or make a reservation or just talk about logistics with a friend when we're trying to figure out where someone is and where to go or all sorts of setting up scheduling meetings that was just a conversation we definitely didn't want to have basically everything task oriented was a one because if there was just one button for me to just or not even a button if I could just thing and there was some magic BCI that would just immediately transform that into an actual Into action, that would be perfect. But the conversation there was just this.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just thought, okay, we'll have this tech. We can build any chatbot we want, we have the most at that point, the most sophisticated tech that other companies have, I mean, startups obviously not, probably not bigger ones, but still, because we've been working on it for a while. So I thought, okay, we can build any conversation. So let's just create a scale from 1 to 10. And one would be conversations that you'd pay to not have. And 10 would be conversations you'd pay to have. And I mean, obviously, we want to build conversation of people would pay to, you know, to actually have. And so for the whole”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, which is, I think, kind of the right thing to go about what's the magical experience with that interface specifically.”
2020-09-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #121 – Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source