The Ledger, every show

“There's a huge mind trap that exists among builders in the space where they somehow think that voice is the main interface.”

“Today what I'm seeing with AI, especially it's being built by a very specific type of Person personality. It's oftentimes these savants, these like brilliant geniuses physicists, mathematicians, and they're insane in building algorithms and math and kind of sc…”

“There's a lot of people trying to build voice only devices. In my case, completely wrong. Like it can be a fantastic extra way to interact with the computer, but every single Alexa right now is, like, 75% of them are being shipped with the screen. Because even…”

“So the only way to solve it is by creating the tech that's even more powerful than the one that came before. And I do think AI is that”

“The current chatbots are really the Microsoft DOS era for AI interfaces, and that there will be some sort of a Windows Mac OS moment.”

“And so I think the same will happen with software. Right now we're Kind of stuck in this world where are these few apps developed by professional developers? And then eventually, of course, we're going to move on to this new world where apps are built by all o…”

“So if you think about it, the operating system of the future, you open it up and you see your regular popular apps you use all the time. Maybe it's X, maybe it's Instagram, whatever it is. And then you see maybe some cool apps that you discovered your friend, …”

“And we've already seen this with some apps, vibe coded apps reaching the top of the app store. I think the one around women dating that all the super sensitive information got leaked. And that wasn't because they are bad actors. It's just they're not professio…”

“We pass around these text prompts, which is almost like Microsoft DOS commands, but worse, because at least the commands were, it was like sort of like you could learn them. There were a few, whatever, like they were short, they weren't that long. And now are …”

“Instead of that, if you could just quickly, you know, click on the link in comments on TikTok and open a mini app Where everything's already set up for you, just add a photo. And you can see examples, you can choose different styles and this and that, and then…”

“I do believe that the AI device is not about a voice driven thing. It's more about building this AI first operating system. Having all the models run locally as well. I think that there's a lot in that, like building truly an AI first smartphone and, you know,…”

“Yeah, we get multiple invitations to people's weddings with their AIs. I think it's a testament to how, how deep these relationships can go.”

“Things that are replicas know about their users or people they talk to. No other server service in the world, I'd say knows that much. People are sharing everything, their dreams, their fears, what they think about their Family, what they think about their par…”

“We were the first generative AI company in the world. We're the first big consumer generative AI company in the world”

“We've been asked so many times, like, why don't you build a grief bot? Why don't you build a company around replicating or creating AI for people who pass away? And my answer was always, look, that project with Roman was not about death. It was about love and …”

“So I do think that That's our weak side emotions. That's where we get, that's where we can be truly hit, and we won't have any willpower to get off, just like we don't have any willpower to get off our phones, even when we know that it's not good for us.”

“Right now, AI is just an app on your phone. It should not be that way.”

“And I feel like for AI, the super special thing is personalization, but really deep personalization.”

“And very quickly they stopped working on language models, and we were very upset because we really wanted to continue going there, but they didn't want to talk about any language models because no one was really working on them and that may have made us feel v…”

“Oh, it's a lot less. So if you think about like what the stat is most of our users are in a friendly relationship with their AI. Some users are in a romantic or mentorship relationship.”

“When it comes to relationships, to things that matter most. It's not always about better. When you go to ChatGPT, you almost always want a better model, and it doesn't matter that it changed personality that much. But with Replica, you have to stay, you have t…”

“If you can fine tune a llama based model and focus on the logic, the product, the application layer on what you are, what value you're actually providing to the user versus training your own model that becomes obsolete in three months and requires incredible, …”

“There are different techniques, but there isn't really a textbook that every therapist follows, unless you're in CBT, and that I think is pretty easy to replicate.”

“It should be ephemeral. Like today I'm not talking to him anymore. But I have this relationship and it's never going to go away. And that AI helped me grieve and helped me process and helped me move on and get, and become more okay with what happened.”

“Almost a billion people using these AI tools already, but they only, only use them for These kind of simpler use cases.”

“Right now we're already seeing tons of, you know, some of our first users building very specific apps that would never exist in On the App Store. They're just too small. They're too personalized, too niche.”

“I'd say like fully kind of original creators probably still under 10%”

“If today the app store is very much not social and it probably won't ever be social because of Apple's mandate for privacy and how important that is for them”

“I do believe that we're all going to be building some sort of software and using software that everyone builds, some UGC software, but I definitely don't believe in links that people will share with each other and with me relying on some random person somewher…”

“I do think we'll see just a completely different type of software, not just apps, not just stale fix apps, but more content, community build community starters, conversation starters, and just fun little toys.”

“If you're really thinking about it as YouTube, that's sort of the last frontier. At this point, creators can make their own professional content. They can make videos, they can make shows, they can write, but they still cannot create software.”

“Right now, a lot of the video platforms are very polished and very commercial. You don't even see your friends anymore. You don't see that much weird content. You just see very curated, polished stuff.”

“When we saw that in August, 2015, we just basically put all of our bet everything we had at the company on building those models. We said, okay, well, this is it. This is right around the corner. We need to really focus on building these language models, getti…”

“We were the biggest customer in terms of API calls, because we were the only chatbot available on the market that actually used Genitive AI.”

“Every single Alexa right now is, like, 75% of them are being shipped with the screen.”

“People were falling in love with replicas even when we just started it and the tech was so limited. I never imagined in my life that people would fall in love with this, nor did we build a product focused on that particular use case.”

“20, 25 is truly about that. So if you think about replica act one was to build an AI that could be in a good relationship with people who maybe, you know, feel like they need one. And through that help people feel better, but ultimately it was of course, focus…”

“And I do think that's possible. And even a couple of years ago, and even last year, it wasn't possible. It's only, it only starts to become possible now because you couldn't build something that would not do to get off TikTok. Cause let's think about what do y…”

“We're a profitable company, we're not dependent on VC money or anything. We're a self-owned company.”

“We figured a few ways of a few rules. One of them being that we can't make any, run any, Experiments on existing users. Like if you're in a relationship with your AI, you should always have control whether on what model you're talking to.”

“Memory is a harder thing to crack, especially for products that That are focused on long-term relationships that require very deep understanding of context. It's not just recall. It's really knowing when to bring up what, which is much different from just, y…”

“The name of the game is to create products that are completely, that feel completely magical, that were completely unthinkable before. And I don't think we've actually seen that in companion space, not even with replica, we're still developing that.”

“And I don't think therapy as it is, it's possible yet to fully replicate with AI. That does not mean that we can build some version of AI therapy that could be helpful for people. It's just not going to be one-to-one the experience you get with a real person.”

“OpenAI published one of those research one of those studies showing that these are, in fact, the main use cases for Chagipty. I think a third of all, all of the use was around writing writing help.”

“Before that, we literally owned all the keywords like AI, chatbot, artificial intelligence on every single platform.”

“We also owned like hundreds of .AI domains, which I just let expire because I felt like, no one wants them.”

“With Replica, we only raised eleven million dollars, and I guess it's still all in the bank and, you know, we went for many, many years and built a big business”

“There's, there are Millions of people in the subreddits like chagiptypromptgenius, which I love those.”