Noam Shazeer, Co-founder and CEO of Character.AI, speaks with a16z partner Sarah Wang about future breakthrough applications of AI models.
Insight
Entertainment is a $2T industry built on imaginary friends
“Entertainment is like this two trillion dollar a year industry. And like the dirty secret is that entertainment Is imaginary friends that don't know you exist.”
Insight
LLM hallucination is a feature, not a bug, for AI companions
“Like you want to launch something that's a doctor, It's going to be a lot slower because you want to be really, really, really careful about not providing like false information, but friend, you can do like really fast. Like it's just entertainment. It makes t…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
AI companion entertainment is ready for immediate explosive adoption
“If I, like, I want to push this technology ahead fast, like, that's what I want to go with, because like, A, it's, you know, it's ready for an explosion, like right now, not like in five years when we solve all the problems, but like, now.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Character.AI aims for AGI by building consumer products at scale
“Our goal is to be like an AGI company and a product first company. And the way to do that is by picking the right product that forces us to work on the right things, things that generalize, make the model smarter, make it, like, do what people, you know, what …”
Disclosure
Frustration over inability to launch AI products drove Google exit
“You know, some people are motivated by publishing, you know, like, I was frustrated I couldn't launch at Google.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Theory of mind in AI is an emergent property of scale
“Yeah, just make the thing smarter. It's gonna have a better theory of mind, and I think that's definitely something massively, massively important. It seems like one of these emergent properties that just Is gonna, going to come with scale.”