Transcription
In video. First to be ahead. About Fore level. Here is Robio.
Hey Rob.
Sven.
Thanks for making me immortal.
No problem. Um, uh, I, I learned, um, you, you do have already customers for your, for your AI person twin thing. And you, you told me the majority of the customers is in Germany.
Yeah. How come? Because our first customer was this gentleman, Michael Bomber, um, who, uh, was dying at the time. This a year ago and we made him the first AI and in Germany he was, how many people had seen like about Michael, if you raise your hand, documentaries he was on TV. Yeah. And there was a lot of press about what he was doing. People were so fascinated in Germany about how he was, he was, he was dying of cancer, but we, we basically made him into an AI so he could live forever.
Yeah. Great. Great. And you, you have a special affinity to Germany. You, you studied in Germany, right?
Yeah, I studied in Heidelberg and my wife's German from Kiel.
Oh, very good. So, so you are fluent in German.
Ishmo and perfect.
That's that's what I learned in Heidelberg. Good education on how to make.
Perfect. So, uh, let's don't waste time.
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm really happy to have you here on this stage and, uh, excited to hear a story. So, this is your stage.
Great. Well, thanks for having me here. Um, I wanted to talk today about what I think is going to be the greatest change in AI. That was fun. Before I go, I just jumped off. I got so excited.
This one.
Thank you. Um, I want to talk to what I think is going to be one of the greatest changes in AI. And I, I actually left my company, which I ran for 28 years to go pursue this vision that I have about AI that's really happening. I actually moved to Silicon Valley. I was living in New York because I wanted to be in the middle of the action. So, let me, uh, get my slides up. Oh, yes.
So, let's talk about what we all are familiar with and what we're hearing about in AI, which is that this general intelligence may one day take over the world. It may not need us anymore. But I'm here to to talk about what I think the reality will be will be in that I think there's going to be personal AIs. And I'm making a big bet on this. I think each of us will have our own AIs and I believe that those AIs will be our primary interface to AI. Not that you're talking to an Alexa or ChatGPT, a general AI, but it's you. So I want to sort of take you through the build of why I think that can happen and where we are today, uh, in AI.
One of the biggest things when I left my company was when I thought about this technology, I thought about in order to, um, build a company around it. I thought the company had to have a brand around community and connection. I think AI has to be removed from being big tech, from being something that's in the middle of Silicon Valley that's being given to us and we have to trust. I felt that we have an opportunity to restart the technology world. We've seen a lot of challenges in the last couple years with social media and all that. We all know all about that. But I thought like if myself as a leader could go out into the world and build an AI company, the the brand of AI to me is about community and connection. And I think we have to be able to answer answer that question. Does this create better community and connection? Because no matter what we're doing in the world, that's why we're here. And that's why I've set out to build this company called Eternos.
But let's start with kind of where we are. If you remember from 2001 of Space Odyssey, HAL, the general intelligent computer. And let's, I'll play a little scene from HAL.
Open the pod bay door.
This is when he's talking to a human that's outside the the ship.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
What's the problem?
I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
What are you talking about, man? This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
I don't know what you're talking about, HAL.
I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL? Although you took very thorough precautions in the path against my hearing you could see your lips move.
So when we think about this scene and I feel like this kind of set the table to everything that's in our lives about AI today and if you remember Elon Musk a couple years ago said AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization but recently posted on X was that we as humans, what we, what our service is to AI is to have the AI extract all of our knowledge. And then when we're no longer useful, we can kind of like disappear and and and we fear that and we think about that. And that's what AGI is. General intelligence is about this thing that lives outside of us, but yet it uses us to better itself and then in return we lose. And and that's that's trajectory that's been talked about today. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a futurist trajectory potentially. And there's really three underlying principles to that thinking. One is that our meaning and identity doesn't matter. And that that's today. If you go into ChatGPT or Cohere or any of the AI models, our knowledge is there, but but we're not. It's things that you wrote, uh, things that you've published, uh, things that you put on blogs or on the, on, uh, social media has been assumed by the system, but you don't have any credit in it. So, we lose our identity. We can lose our jobs. We all know that, you know, these things can potentially take our jobs, especially if we're white collar workers and knowledge workers, except for Sven, who's a futurist. So, and then what we're going to end up doing in the trajectory we're on today is putting the power in the hands of very few companies in the world. And I think this is a very important thing as as you kind of seen that United States and China and obviously is like a, there's a like a the continuation of a battle going on but it, but it became a battle that was now in technology as you saw during the inauguration, like behind the president was technology leaders and we know that AI is going to have a tremendous this impact. So, there's a, I think in perspective of that there'll be a consolidation in a few, which is also scary. And I don't know if you saw this, but this was this was this just for me made me think we're, we're, we're continuing down the path we're on with technology companies, which is there was a young 26-year-old engineer from OpenAI who became a whistleblower and then he got killed and it looked like a suicide and but it, it was a murder. If you see the scene, and you should look it up, and his mother has been out there, because this is a happy kid. He's doing great. And one day he's dead. What was interesting, whether you believe this or not, of whether he got murdered by someone from OpenAI or not, is that it's in the realm of possibility that that the company is powerful enough and that a government like the US would want that company to be continue to be in power that maybe somebody gets killed. And I, I just connecting those dots I was like, how could tech even, how could that even be a narrative for tech? So we are on a trajectory with artificial general intelligence with the power being in a few companies that scares us.
Okay. Now I'm going to turn to what I think the future will be, which is a different type of future, and that's personal artificial intelligence. And this is why I started Eternos is because I see the power in AI being us, being our knowledge and being in control of it. Each of us being in control of AI.
So our first customer a year ago was a German, uh, friend of mine and his name is Michael Bomber. And Michael posted on Facebook that he had terminal cancer and he was going to die. And I called him up and said, "Michael, I'm working on this new company. We're going to replicate humans." And he was like, "Oh, this is cool. I, this is what I've been thinking about." So we met and we started to build our first AI with Michael. And we did two things. One is we replicated his voice. So we built an AI voice of him using an AI voice model. And it was about an hour's worth of phrases that we had him because we wanted to capture him as a human. His emotion when he says, "I love you." What does that sound like? Or he gets a little angry. What does that sound like? So, we want to capture that as a model. And the second part is we want to capture his stories. And this is what we found was really interesting is there's two types of data sets in the world. There's one that's in your head, the stories you tell yourself, the stories you tell others, and that's an unstructured data set. And then there's the data set of models like OpenAI which are structured data sets off the internet, things that have been written in blogs and websites and documents and books. These are very, very different data sets and they perform differently. So if you think of our brain, we've got neural networks, we have language and then we have stories. We tell our stories all day. That data set is actually more powerful than the data set that the AGI models are using and that's what's within your head. The question is how do we get it out? How do we get it out?
So I remember we made this AI of Michael. He gave us 25 hours of his life stories. Turns out because we have many customers now, at the end of your life, if you were to, if I said to you, "Tell me everything that was important," it comes down to 25 hours. So even though we live a lot more hours than that, you'll tell 25 hours of stories and most of it is the hero story. You started out in life, you had a dream, somebody knocked you down, you picked yourself back up, you had another dream, you got knocked down. That's the life story. And so we captured that. And I remember I, I was, we, I, I flew to Germany. He was in Berlin. And I opened up my computer and I said, "Okay, Michael, start talking to yourself." So he starts asking typical questions like, "What was my favorite time when I was a kid?" and, you know, "Tell me about my parents." And then he started to ask it questions of things that he knows are not in the data set and the AI answered it the way he was thinking. So we, we got the AI to reason because it started to understand the pattern of how he solves problems, of how he went about his life. So he was just like, he was like amazed and they said, "Let me call my wife in Annette." And Annette comes in and she starts to talk to his AI and then she starts to ask it very personal questions. And I remember the first question she asked was, "How did you feel the first time we met?" And this very loving voice, Michael's AI, started to explain his feelings to Annette. And I remember she started to cry and we all started to cry. And I'll tell you, I've been in technology for over 30 years. And I've never been in a place where I saw humanity cross over with technology. And I thought, this is it. This is why we're building AI. AI is very different than all previous technologies because it's a reflection of us. That, that's why we're so, um, curious about it. It reflects us, but it has to be us.
So another example was recently a very well-known writer, uh, in the US, David Kushner, who's written a lot about technology for 20, 30 years. He spent six months with us making an AI of himself and his 92-year-old mother. And he wrote this in an article that just came out, a about a 12-page article in the Business Insider and he said, "It's early Monday. I'm catching up with my 92-year-old mother." She pauses thoughtfully for a few minutes and she answers, "You know, find joy even in difficult times." He says, "As I listen to her speak, I find myself becoming emotional. My throat constricts and my eyes well." And to me, that's the power of this technology. Right there when we capture the human emotion and we bring that together with the idea of infinite technology, infinite wisdom, infinite knowledge.
So when you think personal artificial intelligence, I believe it will lead to better human connection and community. And there's really four pillars to what we're doing today around that in this company. Your AI becomes your best self. Your AI, as you talk to it, as it gathers knowledge, becomes smarter than you. But it's you. And it's funny. We, I was talking to a customer the other day. I said, "What are you doing?" He talks to his AI every day. I mean, every day he's talking to his AI. I said, "What, what went on recently?" He said, "Well, I was out to dinner with a group of friends and one of my friends did something that really pissed me off and I started to talk to my, his name's Brian. I started to talk to Brian. I came home and asked Brian, 'What do you think?'" And Brian gave him a different perspective on it because Brian has a different brain. He has the real Brian's knowledge, but he has a different brain with that knowledge. And it's really fascinating because people start to evolve their AI. It's like Tamagotchis. If you remember the Tamagotchi where you had to keep it alive, people evolve their AIs and they put more and more data sets in to move their AI head. So that's the first part.
The second is you control your data set. When you put your data into OpenAI, you cannot delete it. If you notice, there's no delete button. When you put your AI, when you put your knowledge into a personal AI, you delete it if you want to. You can edit it and you own it. It's your knowledge. And in the case of a business, we have business customers. They share that with others and get paid for it. But it's your knowledge. You own it.
The third part is it's based on real people. There's a proof of person. So every AI has a relationship to a real human being. It's not like your data gets sucked up into, you know, into a big AI and no one knows who you are. It's you and you're certified that it's you. So I have a connection to the expert that you are. Like Sven's an expert. He's a futurist. He's been doing this for over 20 years. His AI is a representation of him and it'll always have his proof that it was him connected to it.
And lastly, it has emotion. It has emotion. And that's what we want out of these systems. We don't want HAL with that red ominous and that weird voice. I just want to say, "I can't let you in," you know. We want something that says, "I love you. I care for you." And if you saw Harvard put out, um, about 3 weeks ago, a study on the uses of AI, the two top uses right now are personal advice and self-help. These were a number of like five and six last year. Number last year, number one and two were like creating emails, writing content. Those dropped down now to number three and four. And number one and two is personal advice.
So, and I think this is the sort of the big takeaway. Your AI would never hurt you. Your AI is not going to take your job. Your AI doesn't want to use you for your knowledge and then toss you away. It's you. And you wouldn't hurt yourself. I mean, sometimes we do. We don't know why we do that, but your AI will never hurt you. And that's why I think personal AIs are our future. So you are intelligence, you are the model, and you are forever. You can be around forever.
And that's one of the big benefits of what we saw is after you get done using your AI in your daily life and you're sharing it with others and maybe you're selling that and making some money from it. When you do die, you can pass it along. And I remember Michael Bomber, I talked to him three days before he did die and we said our goodbyes and he said to me, he said, "Just remember one important thing. The reason I created this was not for them, not for the future generations and my wife who can listen to my voice and talk to me. He said, I created it for me." And there was a real sense of peace that he was leaving himself behind and he got to put his knowledge and who knows who will use it, but it gave him a sense of, you know, purpose, gave him a sense of peace and and I think it's important when I talk about connection to community, the generations ahead could benefit from your knowledge. Your great, great, great, great grandkids could benefit from understanding everything you went through. And I think the world would be a much better place if we had that connective tissue to our past. And that's just an end benefit to creating your own personal AI. So you are AI. Thank you.
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