Matt Paige interviews Vishnu Hari (Vish), CEO and founder of Ego (YC W24), about shifting focus from AGI to “humanness”: AI characters that behave like people through memory, emotions, personality, needs, and desires.

Referencing Ego’s paper “Behavior is All You Need,” Vish argues consumer AI for entertainment must be relatable and character-like rather than purely task-smart, drawing inspiration from MMORPG social dynamics and Character.AI’s appeal.

Ego initially pursued a 3D sim-world vision inspired by Sword Art Online and Westworld, but found accessibility, game development, and perception latency challenging; internal Roblox tests (“Chatterblocks”) showed the key gap is natural speech beyond turn-taking.

Vish discusses simulations as a path toward real-world robotics via a partnership with Menlo AI, critiques task-bound robots versus agents with inner lives, suggests retention as the main metric, and shares views on AGI definitions, safety in entertainment, technology impacts, simulation theory, and consciousness.

Ego’s work is at egoai.com and the company is hiring in SF, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Key Moments:

00:57 Behavior Is All You Need
02:41 Anatomy of Humanlike Agents
03:29 Game Bots to Real People
05:10 Building Ego and Sim Worlds
06:35 Why Speech Feels Human
08:27 From Sims to Robotics
10:29 Her vs Helper Robots
13:17 Measuring Humanness by Retention
15:27 Continual Learning and Personality
16:57 Meta Lessons on Empty Worlds
18:08 Lightning Round on AGI
20:31 IP Characters vs UGC Worlds
21:55 Risks and Just Tuesday
24:11 Simulation and Consciousness

Key Links:

Mentioned in this episode:

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