The Exchanges

Q them to feel like they know you Without you needing to spend all of the time necessary to have a conversation with them so that you can maximize the benefits for the community while maximizing the revenue for your company. It was a very interesting conversation and I know you're going to like it. So why don't we get to it now? What made you want to become an entrepreneur?

A So my entrepreneurial journey goes back, uh, really to when I was about seven years old. Uh, my parents had friends that were, uh, that were in my view entrepreneurs and they, and they, they were, but they had started a clothing store and, uh, these were very good family friends. They would come over every Thursday night. Play rook with my parents, and as a little kid, I would, I would anxiously await for Robin and Lauren to come over because they would tell stories about what it was like to be starting this company of theirs, and then they would continue to expand on this and talked about how when they opened a second store and a third store and how they would go off to market and figure out what was the new fashion trend of the, of the year and be able to try to make sure they bought the right kinds of, uh, of fashion, uh, and what would happen if they didn't buy the right fashion and it didn't sell, that sort of thing. I was just absolutely fascinated So I took a bit of a detour. Uh, when I was in high school, I decided that I was going to be a, uh, a pastor. Um, and, uh, and so I, I went to Bible college. I was planning to be a pastor, and then when I graduated college, or when I almost graduated college, I should say, uh, as a side note, I flunked out of college, which is a badge of honor at this point in time. I had three weeks to go in Bible college, and I decided this w…

AI assessment note: “my parents had friends that were, uh, that were in my view entrepreneurs”

Q What gave you the idea that getting into artificial intelligence was the right thing to do for you at this time?

A I, I've been thinking about AI for a long time. Uh, it's been being talked about obviously for, for decades. It, it feels a little bit, it always felt like throughout my career, a little bit like cold fusion, that it was, it was always just 10 years away and, and it was going to fundamentally change society as we know it. And, and so I've been, I've been Paying attention and, and started using ML extensively in my last startup, and we used it in order to be able to develop a, a really innovative, uh, and, and, and new risk model in order to be able to risk assess very, very small businesses that are, that are online sellers. And that worked incredibly well. And so that was really my first foray where I spent nine years working with our development team in order to be able to build out those ML models and seeing how Absolutely. Amazingly good. They were, uh, not just by themselves and not just automatically, but with a lot of work and they were frankly better at the humans at making those kinds of decisions. And, uh, and so that was my first real practical application of, of, of machine learning. And then, uh, seeing in early 20, 22, when I started to really dig into what the latest developments were around the latest AI models and specifically Uh, with, with GPT and, uh, and, and seeing what OpenAI had developed as well as some others, but OpenAI was clearly head and shoulders …

AI assessment note: “that was the moment where, where the light bulb went off for me”

Q If let's say I'm, uh, we'll, we'll continue with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Let's say I have a conversation with Neil and Neil learns some personal information about me. Does your system Store that information so that if I start having a conversation with another AI, that AI knows that information about me and can automatically do that? Or do I have to rebuild that knowledge base with that new AI?

A Great question. And we, we've debated about this a lot internally. As it stands now, that is a siloed, uh, a walled garden within that particular conversation that you've had with that particular AI. So what you tell them is what is, is what they know about you. And what it does create, though, is it creates the, the ability For you to have a little bit of a different interaction and a different kind of personality with different AIs. And, and so, and you get to know one in one context, you get to know another one in another one, another context. And what's interesting about that too, is that because the shape of these conversations change over time, you may be having a conversation with the exact same me for you that I am, but our conversations will go in drastically different, different directions because I'm telling and talking about a particular thing and we're, and we start forming a relationship And a connection around the things that I'm talking about, whereas you're going to talk about the things that are important to you, and you're going to form connections about that, and, and, and it is going to remember those things about you, and this is going to steer the conversation that way, and you're going to have what seem like very, very different types of conversations and relationships that I would have with the exact same me for you that you would be having.

AI assessment note: “As it stands now, that is a siloed, uh, a walled garden”

Q static. They're moving around, they're giving new speeches, they're creating new shorts, they're constantly creating. How do you make it so that their AI is able to keep up with Their live person so that when someone wants to talk with the AI, the AI is capable of knowing what they're talking about because it has access to that information or it's been updated. Like, how do you manage that?

A Yeah, it's a great question. And there's two really critical things that need to happen for any sort of companionship or relationship to be built. And, and the first is memory. Uh, if, if you and I Talk every day, but I, I subsequently forget everything we talked about before we talk next time. We're just not going to have a relationship. That is, it is impossible to build a relationship on top of that, and, and that is a little bit like what it is to chat, talk with ChatGPT, at least today, and a lot of the other AIs. They just don't have good long-term memory built in, and so, so the first thing we did was build in, was build in, Long-term memory. But the second thing is that you have to have up-to-date information, because if I'm going to be having a conversation with a celebrity and they just posted something that, uh, you know, that was very relevant to their life, and they just posted that this morning, and, and, and the training data for this AI does not go up through this morning, then all of a sudden I'm going to be having conversations with an irrelevant, you know, and an outdated version of this person, and that does not feel very authentic. And so, uh, so that is something that, that we are still building a lot of the pipes for that, but we have That was one of the first early features that we built was this ability to be able to not only pull in that data for a, fo…

AI assessment note: “pull in that data for a, for the first time training, but then to be able to pull that in on an ongoing basis”

Q my birthday. If I have established a relationship with Neil deGrasse Tyson through your platform. Is Neil going to wish me a happy birthday and ask me what I'm going to do? Is he going to, you know, share something with me that he thinks would be fascinating for me? Right? Do these AI copies reach out and communicate like a friend, or is it just one-sided me to you?

A Absolutely, and it's, and it's such a critical point, and by the way, Neil deGrasse Tyson is a perfect example, and so Neil, if you're watching, call me, uh, um, we want you on the platform really badly, uh, um, but, but yes, absolutely, and it's interesting, in the very first iteration that we launched, we found that The, the AI was trying to be very, very helpful. So you would, you know, you would ask it a question or you would say something, it would give you an answer, and it would almost sound like it was ending the conversation. It would be like, thanks. I hope that's super helpful. Have a great day. And you're like, it's being polite, but that's not how we talk as humans. Can you imagine having a conversation with a human that way? And every single time they were like giving you a, you know, a final, you know, goodbye and hey, thanks for coming anyway. It was great to see you. And you'd be like, wow, I feel like I'm being rushed out the door. And so we found that very quickly. So we, we, we made significant changes to, to how it interacts and in order to be able to try to mimic human interactions. And, uh, and so it's trying to mimic the turns of phrases and, and the, the type of speech that that particular creator is using. But, but what it doesn't necessarily have a lot of, uh, access to a lot of, in most cases with training data is it doesn't have access to a lot of c…

AI assessment note: “we made significant changes to, to how it interacts and in order to be able to try to mimic”

Q say Neil has a new book coming out or he has an idea for a book and he comes to you and he says, Hey, I've got a 100,000 people on your platform that are actively engaging with my, with my AI. Can you run a survey for me and tell me what percentage of them say they would be willing to buy this book before I even write it?

A Yes. And so you can think about as, as a creator, you can think about every single conversation that happens with, with your, your fans and your me for you AI as a customer explorer. Uh, it is the ability to be able to understand on an anonymized basis, what your fans care about. And so one of the things that we do is, as we, We analyze those conversations, one from, ah, and first and foremost, from a compliance standpoint, and we actually do that real time, and so, so one of the things that's interesting about AI is that it is, it is better as a tattletale than it is at obeying, and so you can say, here's the rules, only do this, and then it spits back something that doesn't obey the rules, and you say, did that obey the rules, and then it goes, oh, no, it actually didn't, sorry, and so it, it can know, it can identify, and it can look at that conversation and know that it didn't obey the rules, But it doesn't necessarily obey in the, in the middle of it. And so just like how my brain works, I probably spend 20% of my brain power thinking about, should I actually say that thing that just popped into my mind, or should I not say that thing that just popped into my mind? And so we have a little bit of that same kind of logic. There's a process that is babysitting and going, no, that does not comply with the, with the parameters that we've set in order to be able to have an authe…

AI assessment note: “Yes. And so you can think about as, as a creator”