Kuyda: Replika rejected building a company around commercial grief bots
Eugenia Kuyda · Could Your AI Agent Also Be Your Lover? — With Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda · Jan 15, 2025 · at 44:21
Eugenia Kuyda, founder and CEO of Replika, discusses why she refused to commercialize grief bots after creating an AI chatbot trained on texts from her deceased best friend Roman Mazurenko.
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“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 friendship. That was my tribute to him. I wasn't focused on creating an AI for a dead person. I was focusing on continuing the relationship with him. I was focusing on my own feelings on being able to say, I love you again. And that was the main motivator for that, not to create some clone that will continue to live forever.”
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