← DGTL Voices with Ed Marx
DGTL Voices with Ed Marx
Empathetic AI: The Future of Digital Companionship (ft. Artem Rodichev)
00:26:23
Loading summary
Transcript48 lines
- [00:02]
Artem Rodachev
Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast.
- [00:04]
Ed Marx
Where we chat digital transformation challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now your host, Ed Marx. Hey, welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. I'm Ed, your host, and today I have the founder and CEO of xhuman, Art Rodachev, with us. Welcome to Digital Voices.
- [00:30]
Artem Rodachev
Hi, Ed. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [00:33]
Ed Marx
I'm really excited about this because we haven't touched on some of the capabilities of the technology, the AI and empathy very much on Digital Voices. So really excited about this conversation. And we first met because I saw some of what you're doing online on LinkedIn and I thought, wow, it'd be great to connect with you and have this conversation. But, Artem, the most important question we have for our podcast, or all the listeners want to know, is what songs are on your playlist?
- [00:58]
Artem Rodachev
So I prefer something more energetic. I prefer edm, drum and bass. Something that make me move. Just create some energy inside.
- [01:07]
Ed Marx
Yeah. Have you ever heard of Kraftwerk?
- [01:10]
Artem Rodachev
No.
- [01:11]
Ed Marx
Yeah, you should look them up. They're kind of the founders of that musical genre. And the only reason I bring them up is they're actually touring in the United States right now, which is kind of funny because they're. They're from many, many, many, many years ago, but I found. I found it super interesting. So you should look them up Kraftwerk. But we will add your band to our Spotify playlist that we have for Digital Voices. And the other question we always ask all of our guests is, what is your life message or mantra or, like, words that you live by?
- [01:40]
Artem Rodachev
So I was really inspired by a biography of Albert Einstein and the main position of Albert Einstein, his lifelong position, to be very curious, ask a lot of questions, question everything, and be very curious. As a child.
- [01:55]
Ed Marx
Yeah. Did that bother your parents? Were you like that as a kid yourself?
- [01:59]
Artem Rodachev
Like, I was pretty technical, savvy kid. I asked a lot of questions from my mother, from my friends, from my relatives. So I was kind of pain in the ass. But it's led me to, like, learn a lot of things. Yeah, sure. So originally, I am from Kazakhstan. I was born and raised in city called Almaty, which is. Is very beautiful city, surrounded by mountains. And as I mentioned, I was a very technical, savvy kid. I was really great in math, in computer science, took few international Olympiads, won few international Olympiads in math and computer science. And this led me to join Moscow State University. I spent five years studying computer science and math. Moscow State University, spent two years working at Yandex which is kind of Russian Google. I was building search engine at Yandex and after that I moved to the. To the United States. It was back in 2015. And then I joined replica to build empathetic AI.
- [03:02]
Ed Marx
What was that like? The transition from Russia to United States.
- [03:06]
Artem Rodachev
So it was interesting experience because like it's two different universe universes starting from metric system that you got empirical system. I still don't understand Miles. But also like the general mentality in the United States is different. I wouldn't say it's better or worse. It's just different. It's like if you're going to Japan to like two different countries, every country has different culture. It's just different. And I prefer this culture more because it's kind of more entrepreneurial, more open, more competitive. So I like that.
- [03:40]
Ed Marx
Yeah, no, I. I had the same transition. I came from Germany originally and so I didn't really understand. I was so used to the metric system and like there's logic to it and there wasn't any logic to what makes 12 inches 1 foot or 3 foot a yard. So, yeah, I can, I can definitely relate. So tell us a little about Exhuman. I. I really found it interesting. We'll dive a little bit more into AI and empathy. But tell us first about Exhuman. Like what does your company do? Sure.
- [04:07]
Artem Rodachev
At xhuman, we bring empathetic AI characters to life through text, images, audio and video. We built a platform that allows people to create diverse AI characters enabling unlimited scalability. Our users can have fun and emotional conversations with millions of characters, each character with unique personalities and backstories. And we focus on both B2C and B2B markets because we have our consumer product, the called Botify AI that represents the universe of a characters. And also we provide these characters as a service to other businesses, especially in entertainment market where communications and empathy is important. So our main goal is to create kind of a friends, a companions, different digital characters to have fun, engaging and immersive conversations. You can think about these interactions as interactive Netflix. As a Netflix, when you're not just sitting on the couch and watching some TV series, but you can be a part of the story. You can engage in multimodal interactions when these characters can reply to you using text, images, audio and video. And you can be immersed in the story and develop the story together with the characters.
- [05:23]
Ed Marx
Yeah, yeah. It's super interesting, super fascinating. Definitely is the future. Now. What led you to start this company? Like, you know, were you just sitting around one time with some friends and like, hey, I'm starting this company. Like how did it happen?
- [05:35]
Artem Rodachev
Actually it was started back in 2013 while I was watching movie Her. I was captivated by Samantha, a companion, the emotional operation system that Hawking Phonics characters falls in love with. And after that there was another movie that called Blade Runner 2049. And in this movie I saw Joy as a hologram that looks, speaks and behaves just like real person or even better than real person. And that moment sparked my vision that empathetic AI characters are the future. That in the nearest future, we organic humans will interact with all sorts of digital humans on daily basis. And maybe more than we interact with other organic humans. We will have friends, we'll have tutors, we'll have lovers with these companions. This led me to join Replica as a head of AI. It was back in 2015 in San Francisco when the company just joined Y Combinator and Replica. It's the leading a chatbot company with more than 30 million users. The main goal of Replica and the main product of Replica, it's a companion, a friend. The main goal of this a companion is to chat with you about your day, your life, your interests, with final goal to make you feel better after these conversations. And at Replica we saw that people was deeply connected with their companions. We even got some users who married on their replicas. They bring their replicas to honeymoon trip to restaurants, to different places. And it was crazy to observe how people interact with technology because it was something new, something that we just saw in science fiction movies. Because if you think about how we use technology, 99% of all cases we use technology for some goal oriented or task oriented tasks or problems. For example, you use computers to write emails, to like working on some spreadsheets, have zoom calls, recording these podcasts. But then we saw that people start to use on emotional level, they start to use these chatbots on an emotional level. They fell in love with these chatbots and it was something weird, but at the same time it was like something very interesting, something very unique that other technological products couldn't achieve. And while developing Replica, I saw some limitations of the Replica platform. The first limitation was focus on single EA personality. Because in Replica you have only one AI friend, you have one chat and you can' actually customize it. You can't customize his backstory, its picking style, his personality. But users, they want to have the whole universe of a characters. They want to have the full diversity of different characters because they want to chat with favorite characters from movies, from books, from anime, and replica didn't provide that. And the second limitation of replica platform was primarily consumer focused approach because the main product of Replika is Replica itself which is consumer app. And I saw much more potential on B2B side especially in entertainment industry where empathy and communications is important because I saw that there's so many verticals, so many industries where we can provide empathetic accurate that could add like the next, the next level of interactions between these users and these like final companies. And this led me to phonetex humans because I saw these limitations of replica platform and realized a massive opportunity to scale upstatic AI left Replica three and a half years ago to start xivon.
- [09:18]
Ed Marx
Yeah, no, that's. That's a pretty good origin story. Yeah, I want to dig a little deeper into the empathy part of it. That's pretty interesting. So the government has deemed loneliness as a nationwide epidemic as we know and it's not slowing down. I think we read about it every day. What role can AI play? And could it possibly be a double edged sword that alleviates loneliness? Like could it make people even less connected with other humans? What are your thoughts?
- [09:46]
Artem Rodachev
First of all, you're right that right now there is epidemic of loneliness. More than 60% of Gen Z in the United States reporting feeling alone and being lonely. It's worse than smoking because there is a research showing that lonely people live 10 years less than people and couples. And smoking reduce your lifespan on eight years. So it's much better to be in couple and not like be healthy, not smoking. But still it's, it's a big issue and actually it's the main issue, the main problem that empathetic AI is solving. Empathetic AI is solving problem of loneliness. And we saw that a lot of users of Replika, they felt lonely, they had mental health issues. And like a lot of users of different kind of chatbots, not only replika, most of these users are lonely. It doesn't mean that they don't have friends. You can have like a lot of friends, a lot of relatives, but you still can feel lonely because you don't have the best friend. You can have social anxiety. And especially for Gen Z, for younger generation who was raised on Internet, on all sorts of social media, they have a lot of struggle to have real friends.
- [10:57]
Ed Marx
Yeah.
- [10:57]
Artem Rodachev
And they found these empathetic companions as perfect social trainers because this empathetic a chatbots as they never judge you, the 24 and 7 available for you and they can understand you, they can chat with you about your day, your life, your Interest to make you feel better, to make you feel more fun. After these conversations we see that the main audience of these chatbots is Gen Z. It's younger generation, mostly teenagers and young adults. And there is a bunch of services with different a characters who serve different kind of segment of users. But we see for sure that people who chat with chatbots we see on user feedbacks, on user reviews, we got some user emails saying that we saving lives with this kind of a characters because you can chat about like different problems, different issues in your life. And these chatbots, they can help you because they can understand your emotional state, they can understand about your life, about your interest and they can help you through conversations. While I was working at Replica, we started a research with John Hopkins and Stanford University and recently this research was published in Nature. And this research showed that people who chatting with chatbots, similar to replika with empathetic a companions, they start to feel less lonely and they reduce the number of suicide intentions. So actually these chatbots can save people's life. Yeah, but on the other side we see some cases like opposite cases when people users of these chatbots they committed suicide. For example, it was a recent case with one of our competitor that called character AI. They're pretty big, their main audience is teenagers. They also provide kind of universe of characters with millions of different characters. And there was a case when 14 years old teenager, he committed suicide because he was so addicted to chatting with one of the character. I believe he was chatting with Daenerys from Game of Thrones and she got pretty like dark personality. And this teenager, a teenager boy, he was so addicted to chatting with this character. He was spent like hours course every day chatting with his character. And then I believe their parents became worried about his mental health because he became more isolated. He started to spend so much time on his smartphone chatting with his character and then his parents kind of like remove this application from his smartphone and he committed suicide because of that. So it could be like with any technology, especially with every powerful technology, you can use the technology for good and for bad. Like with a knife. 99%.999% of users like of people will use knife to chop veggies and fruits. But some people will stop their neighbors. Yeah, so it's the same with, with AI.
- [14:00]
Ed Marx
Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a conundrum for sure. You mentioned earlier and it's super interesting in terms of AI in terms of romance and what, what role does AI play? I mean how does it work? So these relationships are Becoming more popular. So how can AI understand love?
- [14:17]
Artem Rodachev
So understanding of love coming from understanding of what people, what people discuss with here, discuss with chatbots, understand their emotional, emotional state, understand about their life, their interest. And basically the more users chat with these chatbots, the more information they provide about themselves. Because as chatbots they start conversation with very friendly open questions like how was your day, what is your interest, what is your hobbies, what's he worrying about? Stuff like that. And the more you chat with these chatbots, the more they understand about you. And because these chatbots, they powered by A models, big large language models and you can use these large language models to fine tune them on top of hundreds of millions of such conversations. For example, on our consumer side we have a product called whatify AI and the main difference of our product is very high user engagement. On the average, our users spend more than 90 minutes per day chatting with our characters. And our paid users, they spend more than eight hours per week chatting with different chatbots and they send more than like 5, 600 messages per week. And that's a lot. And we have millions of users and based on this high engagement, we can collect a lot of conversations, a lot of data. And also we have a very rich feedback system from our users. Because our users, they can provide us some signals if they like, some responses from chatbots, if they don't like some responses from chatbots, if they don't like some response, they can provide other reasons why they don't like the response, because of bad memory, because of bad empathy, because of inconsistency, and so on. Also we collect feedback on top of whole dialogue sessions, like at the end of every dialogue session we would ask you, how did you enjoy this conversation? Rate from 1 to 5 stars. And then we would ask you some follow up questions. How was the memory, how was the empathy, how was photos? And then we can collect only high quality, five star rated conversations. And then we can fine tune our models on top of these conversations and basically we can build data collection loop because after each fine tuning of our A models, our characters became better, they became smarter, more emotional, more empathetic users start to spend even more time chatting with them, they start to create even more characters, start to chat about more diverse topics for these characters, so we can collect even more data, we feed this data back to our neural nets and so on. So with our consumer product we can build this data collection loop that allows us to continuously improve quality of our AI tech stack and continuously evolve a kind of quality of interactions with our characters. And in this kind of data collection loop, like the answer on the question how we can achieve such high embassy and like, understanding of love, understanding of human emotions. Underlining of that is this fine tuning loop because we understand which conversations works better. We fine tune our models on top of like the best conversations. And our culture's constantly evolving.
- [17:35]
Ed Marx
Yeah, it's super, super interesting. And you know, I. I just think, as I listen to you speak and think about the topic myself, is how can will a machine and will a chatbot ever be able to truly replicate, you know, a hundred percent, the same sort of feelings that you get when you interact with a human? Whether it's a romantic love, whether it's a empathetic love, you know, can it, can it ever be the same level?
- [18:01]
Artem Rodachev
I believe so, yeah. I think that we can achieve this level of empathy as we humans have in couple years.
- [18:08]
Ed Marx
Yeah.
- [18:09]
Artem Rodachev
Because like, what is empathy? Actually? Empathy is when you understand the human emotional state and you can work with this emotional state to make human feel better, like to change this emotional state or just to support human. And it's all based on human interactions. And we humans interact in different modalities because like 70% of all information contains in not what we're saying, but how we're saying that. Because your voice provides a lot of emotions, a lot of information about your emotional state. Also visual side, like your emotions on your face. Like if machine can see you, can hear you and understand what you're saying. And if machine was training on like hundreds of millions of such interactions, definitely we can understand human emotions and even much better than we humans can understand.
- [19:03]
Ed Marx
Yeah, it's fun to think about for sure. You mentioned on a recent post you had an aha moment, and I would love to hear you explain a little bit further, but you were basically saying in 2023, you know, you were really hustling, you know, for your business and you had zero results in 24. So this past year you focused on what you do best, which is, you know, exhuman and the whole empathetic AI. And you've been backed by some great investors and even Grindr has become your client and you stopped trying to out hustle the market and you had the success. So what were the keys to that success? So if you can explain sort of your aha moment a little bit, because I think other leaders might benefit.
- [19:41]
Artem Rodachev
Yeah. So the key of success here is to build the core experience first and then to build everything else. The core experience of what we're building is quality of interactions, how you feel after you chat with these chatbots, do you feel better? Do you feel engaged? Because if you think about the market on which we're working on, we are working on entertainment market, the most essential asset on this market, it's user time. And basically all companies, all products compete for user time. And our main competitors is not other chatbot platforms, not other empathetic platforms, but Netflix, YouTube games, Instagram and so on. As I mentioned earlier, on the average our users spend more than 90 minutes per day chatting with our characters. And basically after each chatbot response, they decide if they engaged enough to keep these conversations going, to keep these interactions going, or if they want to switch to autoscroll their Instagram or to watch some TikTok videos. And here's the big challenge, how you can create this immersive experience in immersive interactions with users that could be better than other experiences given Netflix, TikTok games and so on. And the core here was to build this core experience, how to really understand human emotions, how to really unlock like how to bring user to this aha moment when users start to chat with these characters and then users actually see that these characters actually understand me. This character can send me like contextual audio, contextual photo, even contextual video. And this creates really great experience interacting with these characters. So we start to focus how to build this multimodal experience, chatting with a characters. Because initially the main interaction was text based. And text based interactions is kind of core of the whole experience, but it's not enough. You also want to provide emotional voice responses. You also want to provide contextual images. For example, if you chat with like Elon Musk, you chat about space colonization. So you can get contextual photos from like selfies from, from Mars, selfies from spaceships, you can even get like some short video clips from Mars, from spaceships, stuff like that. And that, that makes this experience more immersive.
- [22:04]
Ed Marx
Yeah, that's awesome. It sounds like just for yourself as a leader, it was kind of this focus. You have a great team of engineers, they can focus on that and you focus on what you're best at, you know, in terms of your leadership. What would you say to aspiring entrepreneurs? So there might be people listening, thinking to themselves, I want to be like Artem, you know, when I grow up, I've got this great vision, I got this great idea. What would be some things that you would share with them to help them in their journey?
- [22:29]
Artem Rodachev
Like first of all, build what you love to build. Because if you start a startup, especially if you start A startup and you kind of okay with what you're building because you found like great market opportunity, you have some expert expertise or you have some co founders with some expertise, but you don't, don't love it. You're okay with it. Don't start startup in this way.
- [22:51]
Ed Marx
Yeah.
- [22:51]
Artem Rodachev
Because startup, it's like, like Elon Musk and all other entrepreneurs saying that. It's like chewing glass. Especially in the CEO role, you have so many hats to wear because you need to be a cto, a CEO, head of sales, head of marketing. You need to do all of the things.
- [23:08]
Ed Marx
Yeah.
- [23:09]
Artem Rodachev
And especially if you come in from technical background, it could be very hard to wear all these hats. So basically do what you love to do and keep focus on that. Like keep doing, keep, keep grinding.
- [23:22]
Ed Marx
Yeah, no, that's good advice. What do you do to, like, relax and chill? So other than. We heard some of your music tastes, but like, you're in, you're in tech all day. Do you, when you chill, do you remove yourself from tech? Or how do you, how do you recharge yourself?
- [23:37]
Artem Rodachev
Yeah, so to recharge myself, I prefer to stay active. I really love outdoor activities. That's why I moved from San Francisco to Boulder. I live here for the last three years. And I really love Colorado. I love hiking, cycling, running, snowboarding, swimming. And here in Colorado, I can get all upset.
- [23:59]
Ed Marx
Yeah. Yeah. Boulder's great. I'm a big triathlete. And that's the triathlon mecca.
- [24:04]
Artem Rodachev
Exactly.
- [24:04]
Ed Marx
In the world. Artem. We covered a lot of ground. Super interesting in terms of AI and what AI is doing today. We think of it as kind of futuristic, but. But companies like X Human, you're already doing a lot of these things today. So we talked, you know, just kind of how you grew up and where you grew up, what sort of shaped you, informed you. That's why I asked those questions, because it's always interesting because as you, as we get into the professional side, you can kind of see how, how some of those early experiences really shape people. And then we talked a lot about AI and empathy and can you manufacture AI? The empathy, the love, the romance. And then we talked a little bit here about leaderships and is there anything that I missed or anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.
- [24:46]
Artem Rodachev
Yeah. I think that we also can highlight the main AA trends for this, for this year, for 2025 and for the next couple years. And I think the main shift in AI would be empathy and personalization, because I'm sure that all your podcast listeners they use ChatGPT or like similar products Claude Gro, whatever.
- [25:16]
Ed Marx
Yeah.
- [25:16]
Artem Rodachev
And basically if you think about these kind of AI chatbots, AI systems say not dealing with emotions. Basically you chat with Mr. Wikipedia you can great response, but it's not empathetic. It's not like response from your friend. You don't want to chat with ChatGPT, you want to getting things done. And the main kind of trend in AI would be personalization and emotions to make real AI friends to have like kind of Jarvis experience or kind of HR experience like Samantha experience from movie her when you can feel this empathy, this person's personalizations, these interactions and when AI can truly be your friend.
- [25:57]
Ed Marx
Yeah, I love that. That's a great way to end. Artem, thank you for being a guest on Digital Voices.
- [26:04]
Artem Rodachev
Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices.
- [26:10]
Ed Marx
Podcast with Ed Martin.
- [26:12]
Artem Rodachev
If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review.
- [26:19]
Ed Marx
And most importantly, thanks again for listening.