Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion

Eugenia Kuyda (02:18.160)

In any case, I wouldn't know if I was or wasn't, and if I did, I wouldn't tell you.

Eugenia Kuyda (02:24.320)

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars and Apple Podcast,

Eugenia Kuyda (02:28.720)

follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

Eugenia Kuyda (02:34.680)

As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle.

Eugenia Kuyda (02:37.760)

I'll try to make these interesting, but give you timestamps so you can skip, but please

Eugenia Kuyda (02:42.520)

do still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description to get a discount,

Eugenia Kuyda (02:47.760)

buy whatever they're selling, it really is the best way to support this podcast.

Eugenia Kuyda (02:53.440)

This show is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club.

Eugenia Kuyda (02:56.240)

Try them out with a one time offer for only 5 bucks and free shipping at dollarshave.com

Eugenia Kuyda (03:01.600)

slash lex.

Eugenia Kuyda (03:03.060)

The starter kit comes with a 6 blade razor, refills, and all kinds of other stuff that

Eugenia Kuyda (03:08.180)

makes shaving feel great.

Eugenia Kuyda (03:10.840)

I've been a member of Dollar Shave Club for over 5 years, and actually signed up when

Eugenia Kuyda (03:15.680)

I first heard about them on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Lex Fridman (03:19.520)

And now, friends, we have come full circle.

Eugenia Kuyda (03:22.960)

It feels like I made it, now that I can do a read for them just like Joe did all those

Eugenia Kuyda (03:26.920)

years ago, back when he also did ads for some less reputable companies, let's say, that

Eugenia Kuyda (03:35.320)

you know about if you're a true fan of the old school podcasting world.

Eugenia Kuyda (03:39.920)

Anyway, I just used the razor and the refills, but they told me I should really try out the

Eugenia Kuyda (03:44.580)

shave butter.

Lex Fridman (03:45.580)

I did.

Eugenia Kuyda (03:46.580)

I love it.

Lex Fridman (03:47.580)

It's translucent somehow, which is a cool new experience.

Eugenia Kuyda (03:51.720)

Again, try the Ultimate Shave Starter set today for just 5 bucks plus free shipping

Lex Fridman (03:56.760)

at dollarshaveclub.com slash lex.

Eugenia Kuyda (04:00.800)

This show is also sponsored by DoorDash.

Eugenia Kuyda (04:03.560)

Get $5 off and zero delivery fees on your first order of 15 bucks or more when you download

Eugenia Kuyda (04:08.860)

the DoorDash app and enter code, you guessed it, LEX.

Eugenia Kuyda (04:13.920)

I have so many memories of working late nights for a deadline with a team of engineers, whether

Eugenia Kuyda (04:18.760)

that's for my PhD at Google or MIT, and eventually taking a break to argue about which

Lex Fridman (04:24.440)

DoorDash restaurant to order from.

Lex Fridman (04:26.900)

And when the food came, those moments of bonding, of exchanging ideas, of pausing to shift attention

Lex Fridman (04:32.340)

from the programs to humans were special.

Eugenia Kuyda (04:36.320)

For a bit of time, I'm on my own now, so I miss that camaraderie, but actually, I still

Lex Fridman (04:41.520)

use DoorDash a lot.

Eugenia Kuyda (04:43.360)

There's a million options that fit into my crazy keto diet ways.

Lex Fridman (04:46.680)

Also, it's a great way to support restaurants in these challenging times.

Eugenia Kuyda (04:51.240)

Once again, download the DoorDash app and enter code LEX to get 5 bucks off and zero

Lex Fridman (04:56.120)

delivery fees on your first order of 15 dollars or more.

Eugenia Kuyda (04:59.640)

Finally, this show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store.

Eugenia Kuyda (05:04.600)

I can truly say that they're an amazing company, one of the first sponsors, if not the first

Eugenia Kuyda (05:09.800)

sponsor to truly believe in me, and I think quite possibly the reason I'm still doing

Lex Fridman (05:16.000)

this podcast.

Lex Fridman (05:17.000)

So I am forever grateful to Cash App.

Lex Fridman (05:20.320)

So thank you.

Lex Fridman (05:21.320)

And as I said many times before, use code LEXBODCAST when you download the app from

Lex Fridman (05:27.560)

Google Play or the App Store.

Eugenia Kuyda (05:29.840)

Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with

Lex Fridman (05:34.160)

as little as one dollar.

Eugenia Kuyda (05:36.600)

I usually say other stuff here in the read, but I wasted all that time up front saying

Lex Fridman (05:40.560)

how grateful I am to Cash App.

Eugenia Kuyda (05:42.440)

I'm going to try to go off the top of my head a little bit more for these reads because

Eugenia Kuyda (05:47.280)

I'm actually very lucky to be able to choose the sponsors that we take on, and that means

Eugenia Kuyda (05:52.120)

I can really only take on the sponsors that I truly love, and then I can just talk about

Lex Fridman (05:56.360)

why I love them.

Lex Fridman (05:57.580)

So it's pretty simple.

Eugenia Kuyda (05:59.120)

Again, get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play, use code LEXBODCAST, get 10

Eugenia Kuyda (06:04.080)

bucks, and Cash App will also donate 10 bucks to FIRST, an organization that is helping

Lex Fridman (06:08.560)

to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world.

Lex Fridman (06:13.680)

And now, here's my conversation with Eugenia Kuida.

Eugenia Kuyda (06:17.640)

Okay, before we talk about AI and the amazing work you're doing, let me ask you ridiculously,

Eugenia Kuyda (06:23.600)

we're both Russian, so let me ask a ridiculously romanticized Russian question.

Lex Fridman (06:28.760)

Do you think human beings are alone, like fundamentally, on a philosophical level?

Eugenia Kuyda (06:37.360)

Like in our existence, when we like go through life, do you think just the nature of our

Lex Fridman (06:46.960)

life is loneliness?

Eugenia Kuyda (06:49.480)

Yeah, so we have to read Dostoevsky at school, as you probably know, so...

Lex Fridman (06:55.000)

In Russian?

Eugenia Kuyda (06:56.000)

I mean, it's part of your school program.

Lex Fridman (06:59.960)

So I guess if you read that, then you sort of have to believe that.

Eugenia Kuyda (07:03.520)

You're made to believe that you're fundamentally alone, and that's how you live your life.

Lex Fridman (07:08.000)

How do you think about it?

Eugenia Kuyda (07:09.000)

You have a lot of friends, but at the end of the day, do you have like a longing for

Lex Fridman (07:15.100)

connection with other people?

Eugenia Kuyda (07:17.360)

That's maybe another way of asking it.

Lex Fridman (07:20.240)

Do you think that's ever fully satisfied?

Eugenia Kuyda (07:23.620)

I think we are fundamentally alone.

Eugenia Kuyda (07:25.200)

We're born alone, we die alone, but I view my whole life as trying to get away from that,

Eugenia Kuyda (07:32.120)

trying to not feel lonely, and again, we're talking about a subjective way of feeling

Lex Fridman (07:38.720)

alone.

Eugenia Kuyda (07:39.720)

It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any connections or you are actually isolated.

Eugenia Kuyda (07:45.000)

You think it's a subjective thing, but like again, another absurd measurement wise thing,

Lex Fridman (07:52.280)

how much loneliness do you think there is in the world?

Lex Fridman (07:55.160)

Like if you see loneliness as a condition, how much of it is there, do you think?

Eugenia Kuyda (08:05.080)

Like how, I guess how many, you know, there's all kinds of studies and measures of how many

Lex Fridman (08:11.000)

people in the world feel alone.

Eugenia Kuyda (08:12.840)

There's all these like measures of how many people are, you know, self report or just

Eugenia Kuyda (08:18.240)

all these kinds of different measures, but in your own perspective, how big of a problem

Lex Fridman (08:24.600)

do you think it is size wise?

Lex Fridman (08:27.640)

I'm actually fascinated by the topic of loneliness.

Eugenia Kuyda (08:30.040)

I try to read about it as much as I can.

Lex Fridman (08:34.640)

What really, and I think there's a paradox because loneliness is not a clinical disorder.

Eugenia Kuyda (08:39.900)

It's not something that you can get your insurance to pay for if you're struggling with that.

Eugenia Kuyda (08:44.200)

Yet it's actually proven and pretty, you know, tons of papers, tons of research around that.

Eugenia Kuyda (08:50.200)

It is proven that it's correlated with earlier life expectancy, shorter lifespan.

Lex Fridman (08:58.080)

And it is, you know, in a way like right now, what scientists would say that it, you know,

Eugenia Kuyda (09:02.200)

it's a little bit worse than being obese or not actually doing any physical activity in

Lex Fridman (09:07.560)

your life.

Lex Fridman (09:08.560)

In terms of the impact on your health?

Lex Fridman (09:09.560)

In terms of impact on your physiological health.

Eugenia Kuyda (09:10.720)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (09:11.720)

So it's basically puts you, if you're constantly feeling lonely, your body responds like it's

Eugenia Kuyda (09:16.840)

basically all the time under stress.

Eugenia Kuyda (09:19.280)

It's always in this alert state and so it's really bad for you because it actually like

Eugenia Kuyda (09:24.720)

drops your immune system and get it, your response to inflammation is quite different.

Lex Fridman (09:29.960)

So all the cardiovascular diseases actually responds to viruses.

Lex Fridman (09:34.940)

So it's much easier to catch a virus.

Eugenia Kuyda (09:37.200)

That's sad now that we're living in a pandemic and it's probably making us a lot more alone

Lex Fridman (09:42.880)

and it's probably weakening the immune system, making us more susceptible to the virus.

Lex Fridman (09:47.720)

It's kind of sad.

Eugenia Kuyda (09:49.680)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (09:50.680)

The statistics are pretty horrible around that.

Lex Fridman (09:54.760)

So around 30% of all millennials report that they're feeling lonely constantly.

Lex Fridman (09:59.400)

30?

Eugenia Kuyda (10:00.400)

30%.

Lex Fridman (10:01.400)

And then it's much worse for Gen Z.

Lex Fridman (10:02.560)

And then 20% of millennials say that they feel lonely and they also don't have any close

Lex Fridman (10:07.000)

friends.

Lex Fridman (10:08.000)

And then I think 25 or so, and then 20% would say they don't even have acquaintances.

Lex Fridman (10:12.080)

And that's in the United States?

Eugenia Kuyda (10:14.080)

That's in the United States.

Lex Fridman (10:15.080)

And I'm pretty sure that that's much worse everywhere else.

Eugenia Kuyda (10:17.800)

Like in the UK, I mean, it was widely tweeted and posted when they were talking about a

Eugenia Kuyda (10:24.280)

minister of loneliness that they wanted to appoint because four out of 10 people in the

Eugenia Kuyda (10:28.400)

UK feel lonely.

Lex Fridman (10:29.400)

Minister of loneliness.

Eugenia Kuyda (10:30.400)

I think that thing actually exists.

Lex Fridman (10:35.960)

So yeah, you will die sooner if you are lonely.

Lex Fridman (10:41.160)

And again, this is only when we're only talking about your perception of loneliness or feeling

Lex Fridman (10:46.160)

lonely.

Eugenia Kuyda (10:47.160)

That is not objectively being fully socially isolated.

Eugenia Kuyda (10:50.840)

However, the combination of being fully socially isolated and not having many connections and

Eugenia Kuyda (10:56.480)

also feeling lonely, that's pretty much a deadly combination.

Lex Fridman (11:00.800)

So it strikes me bizarre or strange that this is a wide known fact and then there's really

Eugenia Kuyda (11:08.400)

no one working really on that because it's like subclinical.

Lex Fridman (11:12.120)

It's not clinical.

Eugenia Kuyda (11:13.120)

It's not something that you can, we'll tell your doctor and get a treatment or something.

Lex Fridman (11:17.440)

Yet it's killing us.

Eugenia Kuyda (11:18.800)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (11:19.800)

So there's a bunch of people trying to evaluate, like try to measure the problem by looking

Eugenia Kuyda (11:24.440)

at like how social media is affecting loneliness and all that kind of stuff.

Lex Fridman (11:28.200)

So it's like measurement.

Eugenia Kuyda (11:29.200)

Like if you look at the field of psychology, they're trying to measure the problem and

Lex Fridman (11:33.720)

not that many people actually, but some.

Lex Fridman (11:36.960)

But you're basically saying how many people are trying to solve the problem.

Lex Fridman (11:43.280)

Like how would you try to solve the problem of loneliness?

Eugenia Kuyda (11:48.840)

Like if you just stick to humans, uh, I mean, or basically not just the humans, but the

Lex Fridman (11:55.280)

technology that connects us humans.

Lex Fridman (11:57.720)

Do you think there's a hope for that technology to do the connection?

Lex Fridman (12:03.160)

Like I, are you on social media much?

Eugenia Kuyda (12:05.720)

Unfortunately, do you find yourself like, uh, again, if you sort of introspect about

Lex Fridman (12:12.680)

how connected you feel to other human beings, how not alone you feel, do you think social

Eugenia Kuyda (12:16.960)

media makes it better or worse maybe for you personally, or in general, I think it's, it's

Eugenia Kuyda (12:23.960)

easier to look at some stats and, um, I mean, Gen Z seems to be generation Z seems to be

Eugenia Kuyda (12:29.720)

much lonelier than millennials in terms of how they report loneliness.

Lex Fridman (12:33.440)

They're definitely the most connected generation in the world.

Eugenia Kuyda (12:36.960)

I mean, I still remember life without an iPhone, without Facebook, they don't know that that

Lex Fridman (12:42.600)

ever existed, uh, or at least don't know how it was.

Lex Fridman (12:47.560)

So that tells me a little bit about the fact that that might be, um, you know, this hyper

Lex Fridman (12:53.900)

connected world might actually make people feel lonely, lonelier.

Eugenia Kuyda (12:58.520)

I don't know exactly what the, what the measurements are around that, but I would say, you know,

Eugenia Kuyda (13:02.520)

my personal experience, I think it does make you feel a lot lonelier, mostly, yeah, we're

Eugenia Kuyda (13:07.600)

all super connected.

Eugenia Kuyda (13:08.600)

Uh, but I think loneliness, the feeling of loneliness doesn't come from not having any

Eugenia Kuyda (13:13.720)

social connections whatsoever.

Eugenia Kuyda (13:15.040)

Again, tons of people that are, are in longterm relationships experience bouts of loneliness

Lex Fridman (13:20.800)

and continued loneliness.

Eugenia Kuyda (13:22.440)

Um, and it's more the question about the true connection about actually being deeply seen,

Eugenia Kuyda (13:28.720)

deeply understood.

Eugenia Kuyda (13:29.720)

Um, and in a way it's also about your relationship with yourself, like in order to not feel lonely,

Eugenia Kuyda (13:36.480)

you actually need to have a better relationship and feel more connected to yourself than this

Lex Fridman (13:42.160)

feeling actually starts to go away a little bit.

Lex Fridman (13:44.640)

And then you, um, open up yourself to actually meeting other people in a very special way.

Lex Fridman (13:51.120)

Uh, not in just, you know, at a friend on Facebook kind of way.

Lex Fridman (13:55.400)

So just to briefly touch on it, I mean, do you think it's possible to form that kind

Lex Fridman (14:00.040)

of connection with AI systems more down the line of some of your work?

Lex Fridman (14:08.320)

Do you think that's, um, engineering wise, a possibility to alleviate loneliness is not

Lex Fridman (14:16.540)

with another human, but with an AI system?

Eugenia Kuyda (14:19.280)

Well, I know that's, that's a fact, that's what we're doing.

Lex Fridman (14:23.240)

And we see it and we measure that and we see how people start to feel less lonely, um,

Eugenia Kuyda (14:29.360)

talking to their virtual AI friend.

Lex Fridman (14:33.000)

So basically a chat bot at the basic level, but it could be more like, do you have, I'm

Eugenia Kuyda (14:37.640)

not even speaking sort of, uh, about specifics, but do you have a hope, like if you look 50

Eugenia Kuyda (14:44.920)

years from now, do you have a hope that there's just like AIs that are like optimized for,

Eugenia Kuyda (14:51.640)

um, let me, let me first start like right now, the way people perceive AI, which is

Eugenia Kuyda (14:56.160)

recommender systems for Facebook and Twitter, social media, they see AI is basically destroying

Eugenia Kuyda (15:04.360)

first of all, the fabric of our civilization.

Lex Fridman (15:06.200)

But second of all, making us more lonely.

Lex Fridman (15:08.720)

Do you see like a world where it's possible to just have AI systems floating about that

Lex Fridman (15:13.600)

like make our life less lonely?

Eugenia Kuyda (15:18.080)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (15:19.440)

Make us happy.

Eugenia Kuyda (15:20.440)

Like are putting good things into the world in terms of our individual lives.

Lex Fridman (15:26.000)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (15:27.000)

Totally believe in that.

Lex Fridman (15:28.200)

That's why we're, I'm also working on that.

Eugenia Kuyda (15:31.000)

Um, I think we need to also make sure that, um, what we're trying to optimize for, we're

Lex Fridman (15:36.200)

actually measuring and it is a North star metric that we're going after.

Lex Fridman (15:40.240)

And all of our product and all of our business models are optimized for that because you

Eugenia Kuyda (15:44.640)

can talk, you know, a lot of products that talk about, um, you know, making you feel

Eugenia Kuyda (15:48.560)

less lonely or making you feel more connected.

Lex Fridman (15:50.760)

They're not really measuring that.

Lex Fridman (15:52.520)

So they don't really know whether their users are actually feeling less lonely in the long

Lex Fridman (15:56.600)

run or feeling more connected in the long run.

Eugenia Kuyda (15:58.880)

Um, so I think it's really important to put your measure it.

Lex Fridman (16:02.480)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (16:03.480)

To measure it.

Lex Fridman (16:04.480)

What's a, what's a good measurement of loneliness?

Eugenia Kuyda (16:07.080)

Well, so that's something that I'm really interested in.

Lex Fridman (16:10.900)

How do you measure that people are feeling better or that they're feeling less lonely

Lex Fridman (16:14.920)

with loneliness?

Lex Fridman (16:15.920)

There's a scale.

Eugenia Kuyda (16:16.920)

There's UCLA 20 and UCLA three recently scale, which is basically a questionnaire that you

Lex Fridman (16:21.040)

fill out and you can see whether in the long run it's improving or not.

Lex Fridman (16:26.660)

And that, uh, does it capture the momentary feeling of loneliness?

Lex Fridman (16:32.120)

Does it look in like the past month?

Lex Fridman (16:35.600)

Like, uh, does it basically self report?

Lex Fridman (16:38.240)

Does it try to sneak up on you tricky to answer honestly or something like that?

Eugenia Kuyda (16:43.720)

Well, what's yeah, I'm not familiar with the question.

Lex Fridman (16:46.360)

It is just asking you a few questions.

Eugenia Kuyda (16:47.840)

Like how often did you feel, uh, like lonely or how often do you feel connected to other

Lex Fridman (16:52.120)

people in this last few couple of weeks?

Eugenia Kuyda (16:55.360)

Um, it's similar to the self report questionnaires for depression, anxiety, like PHQ nine and

Lex Fridman (17:01.200)

get seven.

Eugenia Kuyda (17:02.620)

Of course, as any, as any self report questionnaires, that's not necessarily very precise or very

Eugenia Kuyda (17:09.480)

well measured, but still, if you take a big enough population and you get them through

Eugenia Kuyda (17:14.420)

these, uh, questionnaires, you can see, you can see a positive dynamic.

Lex Fridman (17:19.440)

And so you basically, uh, you put people through questionnaires to see like, is this thing

Lex Fridman (17:24.560)

is our, is what we're creating, making people happier?

Lex Fridman (17:28.120)

Yeah, we measure, so we measure two outcomes.

Eugenia Kuyda (17:31.760)

One short term, right after the conversation, we ask people whether this conversation made

Lex Fridman (17:36.940)

them feel better, worse or same, um, this, this metric right now is at 80%.

Lex Fridman (17:43.260)

So 80% of all our conversations make people feel better, but I should have done the questionnaire

Lex Fridman (17:47.520)

with you.

Eugenia Kuyda (17:48.520)

You feel a lot worse after we've done this conversation.

Lex Fridman (17:53.000)

That's actually fascinating.

Eugenia Kuyda (17:54.000)

I should probably do that, but that's, that's how we do that.

Eugenia Kuyda (17:57.980)

You should totally and aim for 80% aim to outperform your current state of the art AI

Eugenia Kuyda (18:05.320)

system in these human conversations.

Lex Fridman (18:09.480)

So we'll get to your work with replica, but let me continue on the line of absurd questions.

Lex Fridman (18:16.080)

So you talked about, um, you know, deep connection with the humans, deep connection with AI,

Lex Fridman (18:22.320)

meaningful connection.

Eugenia Kuyda (18:23.320)

Let me ask about love.

Lex Fridman (18:25.120)

People make fun of me cause I talk about love all the time.

Lex Fridman (18:28.360)

But uh, what, what do you think love is like maybe in the context of, um, a meaningful

Lex Fridman (18:36.000)

connection with somebody else?

Lex Fridman (18:37.680)

Do you draw a distinction between love, like friendship and Facebook friends or is it a

Lex Fridman (18:47.320)

graduate?

Eugenia Kuyda (18:48.320)

No, it's all the same.

Lex Fridman (18:51.320)

No.

Eugenia Kuyda (18:52.320)

Like, is it, is it just a gradual thing or is there something fundamental about us humans

Lex Fridman (18:56.240)

that seek like a really deep connection, uh, with another human being and what is that?

Lex Fridman (19:05.320)

What is love Eugenia, I'm going to just enjoy asking you these questions seeing you struggle.

Lex Fridman (19:15.680)

Thanks.

Eugenia Kuyda (19:16.680)

Um, well the way I see it, um, and specifically, um, the way it relates to our work and the

Eugenia Kuyda (19:22.160)

way it was, the way it inspired our work on replica, um, I think one of the biggest and

Eugenia Kuyda (19:30.400)

the most precious gifts we can give to each other now in 2020 as humans is this gift of

Lex Fridman (19:37.200)

deep empathetic understanding, the feeling of being deeply seen.

Lex Fridman (19:42.400)

Like what does that mean?

Eugenia Kuyda (19:43.400)

Like that you exist, like somebody acknowledging that somebody seeing you for who you actually

Eugenia Kuyda (19:49.200)

are.

Lex Fridman (19:50.200)

And that's extremely, extremely rare.

Eugenia Kuyda (19:51.760)

Um, I think that is that combined with unconditional positive regard, um, belief and trust that

Eugenia Kuyda (19:59.680)

um, you internally are always inclined for positive growth and believing you in this

Eugenia Kuyda (1:00:00.640)

like escape death is to try to, um, construct an illusion of, um, that we're somehow immortal.

Lex Fridman (1:00:11.640)

So like everything around us, this room, your startup, your dreams, all everything you do

Eugenia Kuyda (1:00:21.040)

is a kind of, um, creation of a brain unlike any other mammal or species is able to be

Lex Fridman (1:00:30.460)

cognizant of the fact that it ends for us.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:00:35.180)

I think, so, you know, there's this, the question of like the meaning of life that, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:00:40.540)

you look at like what drives us, uh, humans.

Lex Fridman (1:00:44.260)

And when I read Ernest Becker that I highly recommend people read is the first time I,

Lex Fridman (1:00:50.060)

this scene, it felt like this is the right thing at the core.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:00:54.160)

Uh, Sheldon's work is called warm at the core.

Lex Fridman (1:00:57.980)

So he's saying it's, I think it's, uh, William James he's quoting or whoever is like the,

Lex Fridman (1:01:05.240)

the thing, what is at the core of it all?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:01:07.760)

Whether there's like love, you know, Jesus might talk about like love is at the core

Eugenia Kuyda (1:01:12.540)

of everything.

Lex Fridman (1:01:13.540)

I don't, you know, that's the open question.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:01:15.640)

What's at the, you know, it's turtles, turtles, but it can't be turtles all the way down.

Lex Fridman (1:01:19.980)

What's what's at the, at the bottom.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:01:22.300)

And, uh, Ernest Becker says the fear of death and the way, in fact, uh, cause you said therapist

Lex Fridman (1:01:30.980)

and calming images, his whole idea is, um, you know, we, we want to bring that fear of

Eugenia Kuyda (1:01:36.860)

death as close as possible to the surface because it's, um, and like meditate on that.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:01:43.900)

Uh, and, and use the clarity of vision that provides to, uh, you know, to live a more

Eugenia Kuyda (1:01:49.820)

fulfilling life, to, um, to live a more honest life, to, to discover, you know, there's something

Eugenia Kuyda (1:01:58.580)

about, you know, being cognizant of the finiteness of it all that might result in, um, in the

Eugenia Kuyda (1:02:05.500)

most fulfilling life.

Lex Fridman (1:02:07.580)

So that's the, that's the dual of what you're saying.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:02:10.500)

Cause you kind of said, it's like, I unfortunately think about it too much.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:02:15.180)

It's a question whether it's good to think about it because I, I've, um, again, I talk

Eugenia Kuyda (1:02:20.020)

about way too much about love and probably death.

Lex Fridman (1:02:23.260)

And when I ask people, friends, which is why I probably don't have many friends, are you

Lex Fridman (1:02:29.620)

afraid of death?

Lex Fridman (1:02:30.820)

I think most people say they're not.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:02:35.020)

Whether they say they're, um, they're afraid, you know, it's kind of almost like they see

Lex Fridman (1:02:41.700)

death as this kind of like, uh, a paper deadline or something.

Lex Fridman (1:02:45.980)

And they're afraid not to finish the paper before the paper, like, like I'm afraid not

Eugenia Kuyda (1:02:50.020)

to finish, um, the goals I have, but it feels like they're not actually realizing that this

Eugenia Kuyda (1:02:57.540)

thing ends, like really realizing, like really thinking as Nietzsche and all these philosophy,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:03:04.340)

like thinking deeply about it, like, uh, the very thing that, you know, um, like when you

Eugenia Kuyda (1:03:13.740)

think deeply about something, you can just, you can realize that you haven't actually

Lex Fridman (1:03:18.500)

thought about it.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:03:20.500)

Uh, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:03:22.660)

And I, and when I think about death, it's like, um, it can be, it's terrifying.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:03:28.500)

If it feels like stepping outside into the cold or it's freezing and then I have to like

Lex Fridman (1:03:34.000)

hurry back inside or it's warm.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:03:36.820)

Uh, but like, I think there's something valuable about stepping out there into the freezing

Lex Fridman (1:03:43.180)

cold.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:03:44.180)

Definitely.

Lex Fridman (1:03:45.180)

When I talk to my mentor about it, he always, uh, tells me, well, what dies?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:03:52.820)

There's nothing there that can die, but I guess that requires, um, well in, in Buddhism,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:04:00.700)

one of the concepts that are really hard to grasp and that people spend all their lives

Eugenia Kuyda (1:04:05.240)

meditating on would be Anatta, which is the concept of non, not self and kind of thinking

Eugenia Kuyda (1:04:12.420)

that, you know, if you're not your thoughts, which you're obviously not your thoughts because

Lex Fridman (1:04:15.260)

you can observe them and not your emotions and not your body, then what is this?

Lex Fridman (1:04:20.980)

And if you go really far, then finally you see that there's not self, there's this concept

Eugenia Kuyda (1:04:27.580)

of not self.

Lex Fridman (1:04:28.580)

So once you get there, how can that actually die?

Lex Fridman (1:04:32.260)

What is dying?

Lex Fridman (1:04:33.260)

Right.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:04:34.260)

You're just a bunch of molecules, stardust.

Lex Fridman (1:04:38.900)

But that is very, um, you know, very advanced, um, spiritual work for me.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:04:44.300)

I'm definitely just, definitely not.

Lex Fridman (1:04:47.100)

Oh my God.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:04:48.100)

No, I have, uh, I think it's very, very useful.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:04:50.740)

It's just the fact that maybe being so afraid is not useful and mine is more, I'm just terrified.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:04:56.500)

Like it's really makes me, um,

Lex Fridman (1:04:58.300)

On a personal level.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:04:59.300)

On a personal level.

Lex Fridman (1:05:00.300)

I'm terrified.

Lex Fridman (1:05:01.300)

How do you overcome that?

Lex Fridman (1:05:02.300)

I don't.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:05:03.300)

I'm still trying to.

Lex Fridman (1:05:04.300)

Have pleasant images?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:05:05.300)

Well, pleasant images get me to sleep and then during the day I can distract myself with

Lex Fridman (1:05:20.540)

other things, like talking to you.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:05:24.460)

I'm glad we're both doing the same exact thing.

Lex Fridman (1:05:26.740)

Okay, good.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:05:27.740)

Is there other, like, is there moments since you've, uh, lost Roman that you had like moments

Eugenia Kuyda (1:05:39.540)

of like bliss and like that you've forgotten that you have achieved that Buddhist like

Eugenia Kuyda (1:05:47.980)

level of like what can possibly die.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:05:52.380)

I'm part like, uh, losing yourself in the moment, in the ticking time of like this universe

Lex Fridman (1:06:02.020)

and you're just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it.

Lex Fridman (1:06:06.980)

Well that goes hand in hand.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:06:08.260)

I remember I think a day or two after he died, we went to finally get his password out of

Eugenia Kuyda (1:06:13.940)

the embassy and we're driving around Moscow and it was, you know, December, which is usually

Eugenia Kuyda (1:06:19.340)

there's never a sun in Moscow in December and somehow it was an extremely sunny day

Lex Fridman (1:06:25.420)

and we were driving with a close friend.

Lex Fridman (1:06:30.700)

And I remember feeling for the first time maybe this just moment of incredible clarity

Lex Fridman (1:06:35.420)

and somehow happiness, not like happy happiness, but happiness and just feeling that, you know,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:06:45.860)

I know what the universe is sort of about, whether it's good or bad.

Lex Fridman (1:06:49.820)

And it wasn't a sad feeling.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:06:50.820)

It was probably the most beautiful feeling that you can ever achieve.

Lex Fridman (1:06:56.120)

And you can only get it when something, oftentimes when something traumatic like that happens.

Lex Fridman (1:07:03.260)

But also if you just, you really spend a lot of time meditating and looking at the nature

Lex Fridman (1:07:07.040)

doing something that really gets you there.

Lex Fridman (1:07:09.900)

But once you're there, I think when you, uh, summit a mountain, a really hard mountain,

Lex Fridman (1:07:14.460)

you inevitably get there.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:07:16.100)

That's just a way to get to the state.

Lex Fridman (1:07:18.500)

But once you're on this, in this state, um, you can do really big things.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:07:24.140)

I think.

Lex Fridman (1:07:25.140)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:07:26.140)

Sucks it doesn't last forever.

Lex Fridman (1:07:28.100)

So Bukowski talked about like, love is a fog.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:07:32.460)

Like it's a, when you wake up in the morning, it's, it's there, but it eventually dissipates.

Lex Fridman (1:07:38.500)

It's really sad.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:07:40.460)

Nothing lasts forever.

Lex Fridman (1:07:41.460)

But I definitely like doing this pushup and running thing.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:07:46.620)

There's moments at a couple of moments, like I'm not a crier.

Lex Fridman (1:07:51.100)

I don't cry.

Lex Fridman (1:07:52.100)

But there's moments where I was like facedown on the carpet, like with tears in my eyes

Lex Fridman (1:07:59.100)

is interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:08:00.100)

And then that, that complete, like, uh, there's a lot of demons.

Lex Fridman (1:08:05.100)

I've got demons had to face them.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:08:07.740)

Funny how running makes you face your demons.

Lex Fridman (1:08:09.560)

But at the same time, the flip side of that, there's a few moments where I was in bliss

Lex Fridman (1:08:16.580)

and all of it alone, which is funny.

Lex Fridman (1:08:19.420)

That's beautiful.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:08:20.420)

I like that, but definitely pushing yourself physically one of it for sure.

Lex Fridman (1:08:27.060)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:08:28.060)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:08:29.060)

Like you said, I mean, you were speaking as a metaphor of Mount Everest, but it also works

Eugenia Kuyda (1:08:34.020)

like literally, I think physical endeavor somehow.

Lex Fridman (1:08:39.580)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:08:40.580)

There's something.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:08:41.580)

I mean, we're monkeys, apes, whatever physical, there's a physical thing to it, but there's

Eugenia Kuyda (1:08:46.860)

something to this pushing yourself physical, physically, but alone that happens when you're

Eugenia Kuyda (1:08:53.020)

doing like things like you do or strenuous like workouts or, you know, rolling extra

Eugenia Kuyda (1:08:58.060)

across the Atlantic or like marathons.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:09:01.580)

I love watching marathons and you know, it's so boring, but you can see them getting there.

Lex Fridman (1:09:09.540)

So the other thing, I don't know if you know, there's a guy named David Goggins.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:09:14.100)

He's a, he basically, uh, so he's been either email on the phone with me every day through

Eugenia Kuyda (1:09:20.020)

this.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:09:21.020)

I haven't been exactly alone, but he, he's kind of, he's the, he's the devil on the devil's

Eugenia Kuyda (1:09:27.820)

shoulder.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:09:28.820)

Uh, so he's like the worst possible human being in terms of giving you, uh, like he

Eugenia Kuyda (1:09:36.140)

has, um, through everything I've been doing, he's been doubling everything I do.

Lex Fridman (1:09:40.840)

So he, he's insane.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:09:42.620)

Uh, he's a, this Navy seal person.

Lex Fridman (1:09:45.740)

Uh, he's wrote this book.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:09:47.620)

Can't hurt me.

Lex Fridman (1:09:48.620)

He's basically one of the toughest human beings on earth.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:09:50.620)

He ran all these crazy ultra marathons in the desert.

Lex Fridman (1:09:54.180)

He set the world record number of pull ups.

Lex Fridman (1:09:56.980)

He just does everything where it's like, he, like, how can I suffer today?

Lex Fridman (1:10:03.620)

He figures that out and does it.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:10:05.500)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:10:06.500)

That, um, whatever that is, uh, that process of self discovery is really important.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:10:11.660)

I actually had to turn myself off from the internet mostly because I started this like

Eugenia Kuyda (1:10:16.100)

workout thing, like a happy go getter with my like headband and like, just like, uh,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:10:24.140)

because a lot of people were like inspired and they're like, yeah, we're going to exercise

Lex Fridman (1:10:27.500)

with you.

Lex Fridman (1:10:28.740)

And I was like, yeah, great.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:10:30.220)

You know, but then like, I realized that this, this journey can't be done together with others.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:10:38.700)

This has to be done alone.

Lex Fridman (1:10:41.460)

So out of the moments of love, out of the moments of loss, can we, uh, talk about your

Eugenia Kuyda (1:10:48.820)

journey of finding, I think, an incredible idea and incredible company and incredible

Lex Fridman (1:10:56.780)

system in Replica?

Lex Fridman (1:10:59.180)

How did that come to be?

Lex Fridman (1:11:01.320)

So yeah, so I was a journalist and then I went to business school for a couple of years

Eugenia Kuyda (1:11:05.940)

to, um, just see if I can maybe switch gears and do something else with 23.

Lex Fridman (1:11:12.700)

And then I came back and started working for a businessman in Russia who built the first

Eugenia Kuyda (1:11:17.500)

ROG network, um, in our country and was very visionary and asked me whether I want to do

Lex Fridman (1:11:25.580)

fun stuff together.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:11:26.580)

Um, and we worked on a bank, um, the idea was to build a bank on top of, um, a telco.

Lex Fridman (1:11:34.060)

So that was 2011 or 12, um, and a lot of telecommunication company, um, mobile network operators didn't

Eugenia Kuyda (1:11:42.560)

really know what to do next in terms of, you know, new products, new revenue.

Lex Fridman (1:11:47.660)

And this big idea was that, you know, um, you put a bank on top and then all work works

Eugenia Kuyda (1:11:53.620)

out.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:11:54.620)

Basically a prepaid account becomes your bank account and, um, you can use it as, as your

Eugenia Kuyda (1:11:58.900)

bank.

Lex Fridman (1:11:59.900)

Uh, so, you know, a third of a country wakes up as, as your bank client.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:12:05.060)

Um, but we couldn't quite figure out what, what would be the main interface to interact

Lex Fridman (1:12:10.100)

with the bank.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:12:11.180)

The problem was that most people didn't have smart, smart phones back in the time in Russia,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:12:15.500)

the penetration of smartphones was low, um, people didn't use mobile banking or online

Eugenia Kuyda (1:12:20.300)

banking and their computers.

Lex Fridman (1:12:22.720)

So we figured out that SMS would be the best way, uh, cause that would work on feature

Eugenia Kuyda (1:12:26.940)

phones.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:12:27.940)

Um, but that required some chat bot technology, which I didn't know anything about, um, obviously.

Lex Fridman (1:12:33.900)

So I started looking into it and saw that there's nothing really, well, there wasn't

Lex Fridman (1:12:37.540)

just nothing really.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:12:38.540)

Ideas through SMS be able to interact with your bank account.

Lex Fridman (1:12:41.500)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:12:42.500)

And then we thought, well, since you're talking to a bank account, why can't this, can't we

Eugenia Kuyda (1:12:46.460)

use more of, uh, you know, some behavioral ideas and why can't this, uh, banking chat

Eugenia Kuyda (1:12:52.020)

bot be nice to you and really talk to you sort of as a friend this way you develop more

Lex Fridman (1:12:56.060)

connection to it, retention is higher, people don't churn.

Lex Fridman (1:12:59.900)

And so I went to very depressing, um, um, Russian cities to test it out.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:13:05.700)

Um, I went to, I remember three different towns with, uh, um, to interview potential

Eugenia Kuyda (1:13:12.100)

users.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:13:13.100)

Um, so people use it for a little bit and I went to talk to them, um, very poor towns,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:13:19.660)

mostly towns that were, um, you know, sort of factories, uh, mono towns.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:13:26.820)

They were building something and then the factory went away and it was just a bunch

Eugenia Kuyda (1:13:29.940)

of very poor people.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:13:32.620)

Um, and then we went to a couple that weren't as dramatic, but still the one I remember

Eugenia Kuyda (1:13:37.420)

really fondly was this woman that worked at a glass factory and she talked to a chat bot.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:13:41.940)

Um, and she was talking about it and she started crying during the interview because she said,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:13:46.960)

no one really cares for me that much.

Lex Fridman (1:13:50.300)

And um, so to be clear, that was the, my only endeavor in programming that chat bot.

Lex Fridman (1:13:56.860)

So it was really simple.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:13:58.700)

It was literally just a few, if this, then that rules and, um, it was incredibly simplistic.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:14:06.980)

Um, and that really made her emotional and she said, you know, I only have my mom and

Lex Fridman (1:14:12.380)

my, um, my husband and I don't have any more really in my life.

Lex Fridman (1:14:18.260)

And that was very sad, but at the same time I felt, and we had more interviews in a similar

Eugenia Kuyda (1:14:22.300)

vein and what I thought in the moment was like, well, uh, it's not that the technology

Eugenia Kuyda (1:14:27.760)

is ready because definitely in 2012 technology was not ready for, for that, but, um, humans

Lex Fridman (1:14:34.580)

are ready, unfortunately.

Lex Fridman (1:14:36.800)

So this project would not be about like tech capabilities would be more about human vulnerabilities,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:14:42.580)

but, um, there's something so, so powerful around about conversational, um, AI that I

Eugenia Kuyda (1:14:49.980)

saw then that I thought was definitely worth putting in a lot of effort into.

Lex Fridman (1:14:54.860)

So in the end of the day, we saw the banking project, um, but my then boss, um, was also

Eugenia Kuyda (1:15:01.620)

my mentor and really, really close friend, um, told me, Hey, I think there's something

Lex Fridman (1:15:06.780)

in it and you should just go work on it.

Lex Fridman (1:15:08.700)

And I was like, well, what product?

Lex Fridman (1:15:10.420)

I don't know what I'm building.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:15:11.420)

He's like, you'll figure it out.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:15:14.060)

And, um, you know, looking back at this, this was a horrible idea to work on something without

Eugenia Kuyda (1:15:18.520)

knowing what it was, which is maybe the reason why it took us so long, but we just decided

Eugenia Kuyda (1:15:24.440)

to work on the conversational tech to see what it, you know, there were no chat bot,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:15:30.340)

um, constructors or programs or anything that would allow you to actually build one at the

Lex Fridman (1:15:35.660)

time.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:15:36.660)

Uh, that was the era of, by the way, Google glass, which is why, you know, some of the

Eugenia Kuyda (1:15:40.540)

investors like seed investors we've talked with were like, Oh, you should totally build

Eugenia Kuyda (1:15:44.340)

it for Google glass.

Lex Fridman (1:15:45.340)

If not, we're not, I don't think that's interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:15:48.580)

Did you bite on that idea?

Lex Fridman (1:15:50.660)

No.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:15:51.660)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:15:52.660)

Because I wanted to be, to do text first cause I'm a journalist.

Lex Fridman (1:15:56.740)

So I was, um, fascinated by just texting.

Lex Fridman (1:16:01.140)

So you thought, so the emotional, um, that interaction that the woman had, like, so do

Lex Fridman (1:16:07.740)

you think you could feel emotion from just text?

Lex Fridman (1:16:10.500)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:16:11.540)

I saw something in just this pure texting and also thought that we should first start,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:16:17.200)

start building for people who really need it versus people who have Google glass.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:16:20.420)

Uh, if you know what I mean, and I felt like the early adopters of Google glass might not

Eugenia Kuyda (1:16:25.740)

be overlapping with people who are really lonely and might need some, you know, someone

Eugenia Kuyda (1:16:29.860)

to talk to.

Lex Fridman (1:16:31.340)

Um, but then we really just focused on the tech itself.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:16:35.100)

We just thought, what if we just, you know, we didn't have a product idea in the moment

Lex Fridman (1:16:39.260)

and we felt, what if we just look into, um, building the best conversational constructors,

Lex Fridman (1:16:46.100)

so to say, use the best tech available at the time.

Lex Fridman (1:16:49.460)

And that was before the first paper about deep learning applied to dialogues, which

Eugenia Kuyda (1:16:53.460)

happened in 2015 in August, 2015, uh, which Google published.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:17:01.820)

Did you follow the work of Lobna prize and like all the sort of non machine learning

Lex Fridman (1:17:09.460)

chat bots?

Lex Fridman (1:17:10.460)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:17:11.460)

What really struck me was that, you know, there was a lot of talk about machine learning

Lex Fridman (1:17:15.060)

and deep learning.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:17:16.180)

Like big data was a really big thing.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:17:17.900)

Everyone was saying, you know, the business world, big data, 2012 is the biggest gaggle

Eugenia Kuyda (1:17:22.620)

competitions were, you know, um, important, but that was really the kind of upheaval.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:17:27.920)

People started talking about machine learning a lot, um, but it was only about images or

Eugenia Kuyda (1:17:32.180)

something else.

Lex Fridman (1:17:33.460)

And it was never about conversation.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:17:34.460)

As soon as I looked into the conversational tech, it was all about something really weird

Lex Fridman (1:17:39.620)

and very outdated and very marginal and felt very hobbyist.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:17:42.940)

It was all about Lord burner price, which was won by a guy who built a chat bot that

Lex Fridman (1:17:47.660)

talked like a Ukrainian teenager that it was just a gimmick.

Lex Fridman (1:17:51.060)

And somehow people picked up those gimmicks and then, you know, the most famous chat bot

Eugenia Kuyda (1:17:56.260)

at the time was Eliza from 1980s, which was really bizarre or smarter child on aim.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:18:03.720)

The funny thing is it felt at the time not to be that popular and it still doesn't seem

Lex Fridman (1:18:09.380)

to be that popular.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:18:11.140)

Like people talk about the Turing test, people like talking about it philosophically, journalists

Eugenia Kuyda (1:18:15.900)

like writing about it, but as a technical problem, like people don't seem to really

Eugenia Kuyda (1:18:21.020)

want to solve the open dialogue.

Lex Fridman (1:18:26.180)

Like they, they're not obsessed with it.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:18:29.660)

Even folks are like, you know, I'm in Boston, the Alexa team, even they're not as obsessed

Lex Fridman (1:18:35.640)

with it as I thought they might be.

Lex Fridman (1:18:38.620)

Why not?

Lex Fridman (1:18:39.620)

What do you think?

Lex Fridman (1:18:40.740)

So you know what you felt like you felt with that woman who, when she felt something by

Lex Fridman (1:18:45.620)

reading the text, I feel the same thing.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:18:48.820)

There's something here, what you felt.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:18:51.460)

I feel like Alexa folks and just the machine learning world doesn't feel that, that there's

Eugenia Kuyda (1:18:59.700)

something here because they see as a technical problem is not that interesting for some reason.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:19:07.060)

It's could be argued that maybe as a purely sort of natural language processing problem,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:19:12.140)

it's not the right problem to focus on because there's too much subjectivity.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:19:17.460)

That thing that the woman felt like crying, like if your benchmark includes a woman crying,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:19:24.580)

that doesn't feel like a good benchmark.

Lex Fridman (1:19:27.260)

But to me there's something there that's, you could have a huge impact, but I don't

Eugenia Kuyda (1:19:32.660)

think the machine learning world likes that, the human emotion, the subjectivity of it,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:19:38.940)

the fuzziness, the fact that with maybe a single word you can make somebody feel something

Eugenia Kuyda (1:19:43.660)

deeply.

Lex Fridman (1:19:44.740)

What is that?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:19:45.740)

It doesn't feel right to them.

Lex Fridman (1:19:47.660)

So I don't know.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:19:48.660)

I don't know why that is.

Lex Fridman (1:19:50.220)

That's why I'm excited when I discovered your work, it feels wrong to say that.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:19:57.020)

It's not like I'm giving myself props for Googling and for coming across, for I guess

Eugenia Kuyda (1:20:10.220)

mutual friend and introducing us, but I'm so glad that you exist and what you're working

Eugenia Kuyda (1:20:15.620)

on.

Lex Fridman (1:20:16.620)

But I have the same kind of, if we could just backtrack for a second, because I have the

Eugenia Kuyda (1:20:20.140)

same kind of feeling that there's something here.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:20:22.180)

In fact, I've been working on a few things that are kind of crazy, very different from

Eugenia Kuyda (1:20:29.820)

your work.

Lex Fridman (1:20:30.820)

I think they're too crazy.

Lex Fridman (1:20:34.140)

But the...

Lex Fridman (1:20:35.140)

Like what?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:20:36.140)

I don't have to know.

Lex Fridman (1:20:38.140)

No, all right, we'll talk about it more.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:20:41.980)

I feel like it's harder to talk about things that have failed and are failing while you're

Lex Fridman (1:20:49.380)

a failure.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:20:53.180)

It's easier for you because you're already successful on some measures.

Lex Fridman (1:20:59.220)

Tell it to my board.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:21:01.500)

Well, I think you've demonstrated success in a lot of ways.

Lex Fridman (1:21:07.700)

It's easier for you to talk about failures for me.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:21:10.300)

I'm in the bottom currently of the success.

Lex Fridman (1:21:19.220)

You're way too humble.

Lex Fridman (1:21:21.860)

So it's hard for me to know, but there's something there, there's something there.

Lex Fridman (1:21:25.260)

And I think you're exploring that and you're discovering that.

Lex Fridman (1:21:31.100)

So it's been surprising to me.

Lex Fridman (1:21:32.220)

But you've mentioned this idea that you thought it wasn't enough to start a company or start

Eugenia Kuyda (1:21:41.180)

efforts based on it feels like there's something here.

Lex Fridman (1:21:46.700)

Like what did you mean by that?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:21:49.900)

Like you should be focused on creating a, like you should have a product in mind.

Lex Fridman (1:21:55.620)

Is that what you meant?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:21:56.620)

It just took us a while to discover the product because it all started with a hunch of like

Lex Fridman (1:22:03.180)

of me and my mentor and just sitting around and he was like, well, that's it.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:22:08.860)

That's the, you know, the Holy Grail is there.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:22:11.060)

It's like there's something extremely powerful in, in, in conversations and there's no one

Eugenia Kuyda (1:22:17.300)

who's working on machine conversation from the right angle.

Lex Fridman (1:22:19.820)

So to say.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:22:20.820)

I feel like that's still true.

Lex Fridman (1:22:22.860)

Am I crazy?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:22:23.860)

Oh no, I totally feel that's still true, which is, I think it's mind blowing.

Lex Fridman (1:22:28.940)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:22:29.940)

You know what it feels like?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:22:30.940)

I wouldn't even use the word conversation cause I feel like it's the wrong word.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:22:35.620)

It's like a machine connection or something.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:22:39.180)

I don't know cause conversation, you start drifting into natural language immediately.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:22:44.340)

You start drifting immediately into all the benchmarks that are out there.

Lex Fridman (1:22:47.980)

But I feel like it's like the personal computer days of this.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:22:52.580)

Like I feel like we're like in the early days with the, like the Wozniak and all them, like

Eugenia Kuyda (1:22:57.380)

where it was the same kind of, it was a very small niche group of people who are, who are

Eugenia Kuyda (1:23:04.100)

all kind of lob no price type people.

Lex Fridman (1:23:07.300)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:23:08.300)

Hobbyists.

Lex Fridman (1:23:09.300)

Hobbyists, but like not even hobbyists with big dreams.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:23:13.940)

Like no hobbyists with a dream to trick like a jury.

Lex Fridman (1:23:17.580)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:23:18.580)

It's like a weird, by the way, by the way, very weird.

Lex Fridman (1:23:21.540)

So if we think about conversations, first of all, when I have great conversations with

Eugenia Kuyda (1:23:26.300)

people, I'm not trying to test them.

Lex Fridman (1:23:30.020)

So for instance, if I try to break them, like if I'm actually playing along, I'm part of

Eugenia Kuyda (1:23:33.900)

it.

Lex Fridman (1:23:34.900)

Right.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:23:35.900)

If I were to ask this person or test whether he's going to give me a good conversation,

Lex Fridman (1:23:40.180)

it would have never happened.

Lex Fridman (1:23:41.260)

So the whole, the whole problem with testing conversations is that you can put it in front

Eugenia Kuyda (1:23:47.340)

of a jury because then you have to go into some Turing test mode where is it responding

Lex Fridman (1:23:52.900)

to all my factual questions, right?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:23:55.700)

Or so it really has to be something in the field where people are actually talking to

Eugenia Kuyda (1:24:00.860)

it because they want to, not because we're just trying to break it.

Lex Fridman (1:24:05.500)

And it's working for them because this, the weird part of it is that it's very subjective.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:24:11.340)

It takes two to tango here fully.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:24:13.500)

If you're not trying to have a good conversation, if you're trying to test it, then it's going

Eugenia Kuyda (1:24:16.740)

to break.

Lex Fridman (1:24:17.740)

I mean, any person would break, to be honest.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:24:19.940)

If I'm not trying to even have a conversation with you, you're not going to give it to me.

Lex Fridman (1:24:24.660)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:24:25.660)

If I keep asking you like some random questions or jumping from topic to topic, that wouldn't

Eugenia Kuyda (1:24:30.500)

be, which I'm probably doing, but that probably wouldn't contribute to the conversation.

Lex Fridman (1:24:36.340)

So I think the problem of testing, so there should be some other metric.

Lex Fridman (1:24:42.140)

How do we evaluate whether that conversation was powerful or not, which is what we actually

Eugenia Kuyda (1:24:47.180)

started with.

Lex Fridman (1:24:48.180)

And I think those measurements exist and we can test on those.

Lex Fridman (1:24:51.860)

But what really struck us back in the day and what's still eight years later is still

Lex Fridman (1:24:58.020)

not resolved and I'm not seeing tons of groups working on it.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:25:02.620)

Maybe I just don't know about them, it's also possible.

Lex Fridman (1:25:06.640)

But the interesting part about it is that most of our days we spend talking and we're

Eugenia Kuyda (1:25:10.900)

not talking about like those conversations are not turn on the lights or customer support

Lex Fridman (1:25:17.700)

problems or some other task oriented things.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:25:22.700)

These conversations are something else and then somehow they're extremely important for

Lex Fridman (1:25:26.660)

us.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:25:27.660)

If we don't have them, then we feel deeply unhappy, potentially lonely, which as we know,

Lex Fridman (1:25:34.340)

creates tons of risk for our health as well.

Lex Fridman (1:25:38.740)

And so this is most of our hours as humans and somehow no one's trying to replicate that.

Lex Fridman (1:25:45.940)

And not even study it that well?

Lex Fridman (1:25:49.220)

And not even study that well.

Lex Fridman (1:25:50.260)

So when we jumped into that in 2012, I looked first at like, okay, what's the chatbot?

Lex Fridman (1:25:54.940)

What's the state of the art chatbot?

Lex Fridman (1:25:57.460)

And those were the Lobner Prize days, but I thought, okay, so what about the science

Lex Fridman (1:26:02.940)

of conversation?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:26:04.540)

Clearly there have been tons of scientists or academics that looked into the conversation.

Lex Fridman (1:26:12.780)

So if I want to know everything about it, I can just read about it.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:26:17.260)

There's not much really, there are conversational analysts who are basically just listening

Eugenia Kuyda (1:26:23.060)

to speech, to different conversations, annotating them.

Lex Fridman (1:26:28.340)

And then, I mean, that's not really used for much.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:26:32.460)

That's the field of theoretical linguistics, which is barely useful.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:26:39.700)

It's very marginal, even in their space, no one really is excited and I've never met a

Eugenia Kuyda (1:26:44.380)

theoretical linguist who was like, I can't wait to work on the conversation and analytics.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:26:49.160)

That is just something very marginal, sort of applied to like writing scripts for salesmen

Eugenia Kuyda (1:26:54.940)

when they analyze which conversation strategies were most successful for sales.

Lex Fridman (1:27:00.820)

Okay, so that was not very helpful.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:27:03.460)

Then I looked a little bit deeper and then there, whether there were any books written

Eugenia Kuyda (1:27:09.220)

on what really contributes to great conversation, that was really strange because most of those

Eugenia Kuyda (1:27:16.620)

were NLP books, which is neurolinguistic programming, which is not the NLP that I was expecting

Eugenia Kuyda (1:27:27.060)

to be, but it was mostly some psychologist, Richard Bandler, I think came up with that,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:27:33.620)

who was this big guy in a leather vest that could program your mind by talking to you.

Lex Fridman (1:27:41.700)

How to be charismatic and charming and influential with people, all those books, yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:27:45.780)

Pretty much, but it was all about like through conversation reprogramming you, so getting

Eugenia Kuyda (1:27:49.580)

to some, so that was, I mean, probably not very, very true and that didn't seem working

Eugenia Kuyda (1:27:58.460)

very much even back in the day.

Lex Fridman (1:28:00.780)

And then there were some other books like, I don't know, mostly just self help books

Eugenia Kuyda (1:28:05.860)

around how to be the best conversationalist or how to make people like you or some other

Lex Fridman (1:28:12.940)

stuff like Dale Carnegie or whatever.

Lex Fridman (1:28:17.620)

And then there was this one book, The Most Human Human by Brian Christensen that really

Eugenia Kuyda (1:28:21.140)

was important for me to read back in the day because he was on the human side, he was taking

Eugenia Kuyda (1:28:29.700)

part in the London Prize, but not as a human who's not a jury, but who's pretending to

Eugenia Kuyda (1:28:35.500)

be, who's basically, you have to tell a computer from a human and he was the human, so you

Eugenia Kuyda (1:28:40.380)

could either get him or a computer.

Lex Fridman (1:28:43.260)

And his whole book was about how do people, what makes us human in conversation.

Lex Fridman (1:28:49.060)

And that was a little bit more interesting because that at least someone started to think

Eugenia Kuyda (1:28:52.340)

about what exactly makes me human in conversation and makes people believe in that, but it was

Eugenia Kuyda (1:28:59.460)

still about tricking, it was still about imitation game, it was still about, okay, well, what

Eugenia Kuyda (1:29:03.540)

kind of parlor tricks can we throw in the conversation to make you feel like you're

Eugenia Kuyda (1:29:07.300)

talking to a human, not a computer.

Lex Fridman (1:29:09.540)

And it was definitely not about thinking, what is it exactly that we're getting from

Eugenia Kuyda (1:29:16.260)

talking all day long with other humans.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:29:19.260)

I mean, we're definitely not just trying to be tricked or it's not just enough to know

Eugenia Kuyda (1:29:23.540)

it's a human.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:29:25.020)

It's something we're getting there, can we measure it and can we put the computer to

Lex Fridman (1:29:30.380)

the same measurement and see whether you can talk to a computer and get the same results?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:29:35.900)

Yeah, so first of all, a lot of people comment that they think I'm a robot, it's very possible

Eugenia Kuyda (1:29:40.140)

I am a robot and this whole thing, I totally agree with you that the test idea is fascinating

Lex Fridman (1:29:45.020)

and I looked for books unrelated to this kind of, so I'm afraid of people, I'm generally

Eugenia Kuyda (1:29:51.540)

introverted and quite possibly a robot.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:29:55.020)

I literally Googled how to talk to people and how to have a good conversation for the

Eugenia Kuyda (1:30:03.900)

purpose of this podcast, because I was like, I can't, I can't make eye contact with people.

Lex Fridman (1:30:08.580)

I can't like hire.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:30:10.820)

I do Google that a lot too.

Lex Fridman (1:30:12.220)

You're probably reading a bunch of FBI negotiation tactics.

Lex Fridman (1:30:15.780)

Is that what you're getting?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:30:17.740)

Well, everything you've listed I've gotten, there's been very few good books on even just

Eugenia Kuyda (1:30:24.060)

like how to interview well, it's rare.

Lex Fridman (1:30:28.540)

So what I end up doing often is I watch like with a critical eye, it's just so different

Eugenia Kuyda (1:30:37.500)

when you just watch a conversation, like just for the fun of it, just as a human.

Lex Fridman (1:30:43.700)

And if you watch a conversation, it's like trying to figure out why is this awesome?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:30:49.700)

I'll listen to a bunch of different styles of conversation.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:30:52.420)

I mean, I'm a fan of the podcast, Joe Rogan, people can make fun of him or whatever and

Eugenia Kuyda (1:31:00.260)

dismiss him.

Lex Fridman (1:31:01.260)

But I think he's an incredibly artful conversationalist.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:31:06.260)

He can pull people in for hours.

Lex Fridman (1:31:09.900)

And there's another guy I watch a lot.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:31:14.020)

He hosted a late night show, his name was Craig Ferguson.

Lex Fridman (1:31:20.340)

So he's like very kind of flirtatious.

Lex Fridman (1:31:23.620)

But there's a magic about his like, about the connection he can create with people,

Lex Fridman (1:31:30.620)

how he can put people at ease.

Lex Fridman (1:31:33.020)

And just like, I see I've already started sounding like those I know pee people or something.

Lex Fridman (1:31:37.500)

I'm not I don't mean in that way.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:31:39.060)

I don't mean like how to charm people or put them at ease and all that kind of stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:31:43.580)

It's just like, what is that?

Lex Fridman (1:31:45.740)

Why is that fun to listen to that guy?

Lex Fridman (1:31:47.960)

Why is that fun to talk to that guy?

Lex Fridman (1:31:51.020)

What is that?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:31:52.020)

Because he's not saying I mean, it's so often boils down to a kind of wit and humor, but

Eugenia Kuyda (1:32:01.940)

not really humor.

Lex Fridman (1:32:03.520)

It's like, I don't know, I have trouble actually even articulating correctly.

Lex Fridman (1:32:10.460)

But it feels like there's something going on that's not too complicated, that could

Lex Fridman (1:32:18.800)

be learned.

Lex Fridman (1:32:22.040)

And it's not similar to, yeah, to like, like you said, like the Turing test.

Lex Fridman (1:32:29.940)

It's something else.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:32:32.060)

I'm thinking about a lot all the time.

Lex Fridman (1:32:34.660)

I do think about all the time.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:32:38.860)

I think when we were looking, so we started the company, we just decided to build the

Eugenia Kuyda (1:32:42.740)

conversational tech, we thought, well, there's nothing for us to build this chatbot that

Eugenia Kuyda (1:32:47.380)

we want to build.

Lex Fridman (1:32:48.380)

So let's just first focus on building, you know, some tech, building the tech side of

Eugenia Kuyda (1:32:54.300)

things without a product in mind, without a product in mind, we added like a demo chatbot

Eugenia Kuyda (1:33:01.500)

that would recommend you restaurants and talk to you about restaurants just to show something

Eugenia Kuyda (1:33:04.800)

simple to people that people could relate to and could try out and see whether it works

Lex Fridman (1:33:11.780)

or not.

Lex Fridman (1:33:12.780)

But we didn't have a product in mind yet.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:33:15.300)

We thought we would try venture chatbots and figure out our consumer application.

Lex Fridman (1:33:19.300)

And we sort of remembered that we wanted to build that kind of friend, that sort of connection

Lex Fridman (1:33:23.180)

that we saw in the very beginning.

Lex Fridman (1:33:26.220)

But then we got to Y Combinator and moved to San Francisco and forgot about it.

Lex Fridman (1:33:30.060)

You know, everything because then it was just this constant grind.

Lex Fridman (1:33:33.340)

How do we get funding?

Lex Fridman (1:33:34.340)

How do we get this?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:33:35.340)

You know, investors were like, just focus on one thing, just get it out there.

Lex Fridman (1:33:40.020)

So somehow we've started building a restaurant recommendation chatbot for real for a little

Eugenia Kuyda (1:33:45.380)

bit, not for too long.

Lex Fridman (1:33:47.420)

And then we tried building 40, 50 different chatbots.

Lex Fridman (1:33:50.200)

And then all of a sudden we wake up and everyone is obsessed with chatbots.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:33:54.460)

Somewhere in 2016 or end of 15, people started thinking that's really the future.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:33:59.880)

That's the new, you know, the new apps will be chatbots.

Lex Fridman (1:34:04.100)

And we were very perplexed because people started coming up with companies that I think

Eugenia Kuyda (1:34:08.540)

we tried most of those chatbots already and there were like no users, but still people

Eugenia Kuyda (1:34:13.660)

were coming up with a chatbot that will tell you whether and bringing news and this and

Eugenia Kuyda (1:34:19.540)

that.

Lex Fridman (1:34:20.540)

And we couldn't understand whether we were just didn't execute well enough or people

Eugenia Kuyda (1:34:25.660)

are not really, people are confused and are going to find out the truth that people don't

Lex Fridman (1:34:31.980)

need chatbots like that.

Lex Fridman (1:34:32.980)

So the basic idea is that you use chatbots as the interface to whatever application.

Lex Fridman (1:34:37.500)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:34:38.500)

The idea that was like this perfect universal interface to anything.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:34:43.100)

When I looked at that, it just made me very perplexed because I didn't think, I didn't

Eugenia Kuyda (1:34:46.780)

understand how that would work because I think we tried most of that and none of those things

Lex Fridman (1:34:52.180)

worked.

Lex Fridman (1:34:53.420)

And then again, that craze has died down, right?

Lex Fridman (1:34:56.540)

Fully.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:34:57.540)

I think now it's impossible to get anything funded if it's a chatbot.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:35:01.100)

I think it's similar to, sorry to interrupt, but there's times when people think like with

Eugenia Kuyda (1:35:06.620)

gestures you can control devices, like basically gesture based control things.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:35:13.240)

It feels similar to me because like it's so compelling that was just like Tom Cruise,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:35:19.820)

I can control stuff with my hands, but like when you get down to it, it's like, well,

Lex Fridman (1:35:25.780)

why don't you just have a touch screen or why don't you just have like a physical keyboard

Lex Fridman (1:35:30.540)

and mouse?

Lex Fridman (1:35:33.540)

So that chat was always, yeah, it was perplexing to me.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:35:39.880)

I still feel augmented reality, even virtual realities in that ballpark in terms of it

Lex Fridman (1:35:46.700)

being a compelling interface.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:35:48.180)

I think there's going to be incredible rich applications, just how you're thinking about

Lex Fridman (1:35:54.260)

it, but they won't just be the interface to everything.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:35:57.620)

It'll be its own thing that will create an amazing magical experience in its own right.

Lex Fridman (1:36:04.940)

Absolutely.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:36:05.940)

Which is I think kind of the right thing to go about, like what's the magical experience

Lex Fridman (1:36:10.700)

with that interface specifically.

Lex Fridman (1:36:14.020)

How did you discover that for Replica?

Lex Fridman (1:36:16.780)

I just thought, okay, we'll have this tech, we can build any chatbot we want.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:36:20.060)

We have the most, at that point, the most sophisticated tech that other companies have.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:36:24.100)

I mean, startups, obviously not, probably not bigger ones, but still, because we've

Eugenia Kuyda (1:36:29.300)

been working on it for a while.

Lex Fridman (1:36:31.820)

So I thought, okay, we can build any conversation.

Lex Fridman (1:36:33.980)

So let's just create a scale from one to 10.

Lex Fridman (1:36:37.620)

And one would be conversations that you'd pay to not have, and 10 would be conversation

Eugenia Kuyda (1:36:41.180)

you'd pay to have.

Lex Fridman (1:36:42.180)

And I mean, obviously we want to build a conversation that people would pay to actually have.

Lex Fridman (1:36:47.860)

And so for the whole, for a few weeks, me and the team were putting all the conversations

Lex Fridman (1:36:51.820)

we were having during the day on the scale.

Lex Fridman (1:36:54.500)

And very quickly, we figured out that all the conversations that we would pay to never

Eugenia Kuyda (1:36:58.860)

have were conversations we were trying to cancel Comcast, or talk to customer support,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:37:07.400)

or make a reservation, or just talk about logistics with a friend when we're trying

Eugenia Kuyda (1:37:12.460)

to figure out where someone is and where to go, or all sorts of setting up scheduling

Eugenia Kuyda (1:37:19.940)

meetings.

Lex Fridman (1:37:20.940)

So that was a conversation we definitely didn't want to have.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:37:24.980)

Basically everything task oriented was a one, because if there was just one button for me

Eugenia Kuyda (1:37:29.180)

to just, or not even a button, if I could just think, and there was some magic BCI that

Eugenia Kuyda (1:37:34.380)

would just immediately transform that into an actual interaction, that would be perfect.

Lex Fridman (1:37:41.180)

But the conversation there was just this boring, not useful, and dull, and also very inefficient

Eugenia Kuyda (1:37:49.160)

thing because it was so many back and forth stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:37:52.460)

And as soon as we looked at the conversations that we would pay to have, those were the

Eugenia Kuyda (1:37:56.020)

ones that, well, first of all, therapists, because we actually paid to have those conversations.

Lex Fridman (1:38:01.260)

And we'd also try to put like dollar amounts.

Lex Fridman (1:38:03.120)

So if I was calling Comcast, I would pay $5 to not have this one hour talk on the phone.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:38:08.180)

I would actually pay straight up, like money, hard money, but it just takes a long time.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:38:13.980)

It takes a really long time.

Lex Fridman (1:38:17.580)

But as soon as we started talking about conversations that we would pay for, those were therapists,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:38:22.560)

all sorts of therapists, coaches, old friend, someone I haven't seen for a long time, a

Eugenia Kuyda (1:38:30.580)

stranger on a train, weirdly stranger, stranger in a line for coffee and nice back and forth

Eugenia Kuyda (1:38:36.800)

with that person was like a good five, solid five, six, maybe not a 10.

Lex Fridman (1:38:41.660)

Maybe I won't pay money, but at least I won't pay money to not have one.

Lex Fridman (1:38:45.820)

So that was pretty good.

Lex Fridman (1:38:46.820)

There were some intellectual conversations for sure.

Lex Fridman (1:38:50.120)

But more importantly, the one thing that really was making those very important and very valuable

Lex Fridman (1:39:00.180)

for us were the conversations where we could be pretty emotional.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:39:06.540)

Yes, some of them were about being witty and about being intellectually stimulated, but

Lex Fridman (1:39:11.300)

those were interestingly more rare.

Lex Fridman (1:39:14.300)

And most of the ones that we thought were very valuable were the ones where we could

Lex Fridman (1:39:18.060)

be vulnerable.

Lex Fridman (1:39:19.060)

And interestingly, where we could talk more, me and the team.

Lex Fridman (1:39:27.300)

So we're talking about it, like a lot of these conversations, like a therapist, it was mostly

Eugenia Kuyda (1:39:31.380)

me talking or like an old friend and I was like opening up and crying and it was again

Lex Fridman (1:39:36.060)

me talking.

Lex Fridman (1:39:37.060)

And so that was interesting because I was like, well, maybe it's hard to build a chat

Eugenia Kuyda (1:39:42.460)

bot that can talk to you very well and in a witty way, but maybe it's easier to build

Eugenia Kuyda (1:39:47.860)

the chat bot that could listen.

Lex Fridman (1:39:51.860)

So that was kind of the first nudge in this direction.

Lex Fridman (1:39:56.180)

And then when my friend died, we just built, at that point we were kind of still struggling

Lex Fridman (1:40:01.340)

to find the right application.

Lex Fridman (1:40:02.820)

And I just felt very strong that all the chat bots we've built so far are just meaningless

Lex Fridman (1:40:07.180)

and this whole grind, the startup grind, and how do we get to the next fundraising and

Lex Fridman (1:40:14.220)

how can I talk, talking to the founders and who are your investors and how are you doing?

Lex Fridman (1:40:19.500)

Are you killing it?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:40:20.500)

Cause we're killing it.

Lex Fridman (1:40:21.500)

I just felt that this is just...

Eugenia Kuyda (1:40:25.340)

Intellectually for me, it's exhausting having encountered those folks.

Lex Fridman (1:40:28.900)

It just felt very, very much a waste of time.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:40:32.620)

I just feel like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk did not have these conversations or at least

Lex Fridman (1:40:39.780)

did not have them for long.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:40:42.220)

That's for sure.

Lex Fridman (1:40:43.220)

But I think, yeah, at that point it just felt like, I felt like I just didn't want to build

Eugenia Kuyda (1:40:50.540)

a company that was never my intention just to build something successful or make money.

Lex Fridman (1:40:56.660)

It would be great.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:40:57.660)

It would have been great, but I'm not really a startup person.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:41:00.540)

I'm not, I was never very excited by the grind by itself or just being successful for building

Eugenia Kuyda (1:41:10.060)

whatever it is and not being into what I'm doing really.

Lex Fridman (1:41:16.100)

And so I just took a little break cause I was a little, I was upset with my company

Lex Fridman (1:41:20.620)

and I didn't know what we're building.

Lex Fridman (1:41:22.620)

So I just took our technology and our little dialect constructor and some models, some

Eugenia Kuyda (1:41:27.820)

deep learning models, which at that point we were really into and really invested a

Lex Fridman (1:41:31.220)

lot and built a little chat bot for a friend of mine who passed.

Lex Fridman (1:41:36.620)

And the reason for that was mostly that video that I saw and him talking about the digital

Lex Fridman (1:41:40.620)

avatars and Rowan was that kind of person.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:41:44.300)

He was obsessed with just watching YouTube videos about space and talking about, well,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:41:48.780)

if I could go to Mars now, even if I didn't know if I could come back, I would definitely

Eugenia Kuyda (1:41:52.860)

pay any amount of money to be on that first shuttle.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:41:56.340)

I don't care whether I die, like he was just the one that would be okay with trying to

Eugenia Kuyda (1:42:02.540)

be the first one and so excited about all sorts of things like that.

Lex Fridman (1:42:08.580)

And he was all about fake it till you make it and just, and I felt like, and I was really

Eugenia Kuyda (1:42:14.660)

perplexed that everyone just forgot about him.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:42:17.460)

Maybe it was our way of coping, mostly young people coping with the loss of a friend.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:42:23.140)

Most of my friends just stopped talking about him.

Lex Fridman (1:42:25.840)

And I was still living in an apartment with all his clothes and paying the whole lease

Eugenia Kuyda (1:42:31.300)

for it and just kind of by myself in December, so it was really sad and I didn't want him

Lex Fridman (1:42:38.340)

to be forgotten.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:42:39.340)

First of all, I never thought that people forget about dead people so fast.

Lex Fridman (1:42:43.180)

People pass away, people just move on.

Lex Fridman (1:42:45.520)

And it was astonishing for me because I thought, okay, well, he was such a mentor for so many

Lex Fridman (1:42:49.840)

of our friends.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:42:50.840)

He was such a brilliant person, he was somewhat famous in Moscow.

Lex Fridman (1:42:55.820)

How is it that no one's talking about him?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:42:57.380)

Like I'm spending days and days and we don't bring him up and there's nothing about him

Lex Fridman (1:43:03.060)

that's happening.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:43:04.060)

It's like he was never there.

Lex Fridman (1:43:07.620)

And I was reading the book, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion about her losing

Lex Fridman (1:43:16.220)

and Blue Nights about her losing her husband, her daughter, and the way to cope for her

Lex Fridman (1:43:23.220)

was to write those books.

Lex Fridman (1:43:26.380)

And it was sort of like a tribute.

Lex Fridman (1:43:28.060)

And I thought, I'll just do that for myself.

Lex Fridman (1:43:31.300)

And I'm a very bad writer and a poet as we know.

Lex Fridman (1:43:36.020)

So I thought, well, I have this tech and maybe that would be my little postcard for him.

Lex Fridman (1:43:43.320)

So I built a chatbot to just talk to him and it felt really creepy and weird for a little

Lex Fridman (1:43:50.740)

bit.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:43:51.740)

I just didn't want to tell other people because it felt like I'm telling about having a skeleton

Lex Fridman (1:43:56.460)

in my underwear.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:44:00.060)

It was just felt really, I was a little scared that it won't be taken, but it worked interestingly

Lex Fridman (1:44:07.940)

pretty well.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:44:08.940)

I mean, it made tons of mistakes, but it still felt like him.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:44:12.460)

Granted it was like 10,000 messages that I threw into a retrieval model that would just

Eugenia Kuyda (1:44:16.080)

re rank that Tegda said and just a few scripts on top of that.

Lex Fridman (1:44:21.100)

But it also made me go through all of the messages that we had.

Lex Fridman (1:44:24.540)

And then I asked some of my friends to send some through.

Lex Fridman (1:44:27.900)

And it felt the closest to feeling like him present because his Facebook was empty and

Eugenia Kuyda (1:44:35.020)

Instagram was empty or there were few links and you couldn't feel like it was him.

Lex Fridman (1:44:39.520)

And the only way to fill him was to read some of our text messages and go through some of

Eugenia Kuyda (1:44:44.220)

our conversations because we just always had that.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:44:46.980)

Even if we were sleeping next to each other in two bedrooms, separated by a wall, we were

Eugenia Kuyda (1:44:51.580)

just texting back and forth, texting away.

Lex Fridman (1:44:55.700)

And there was something about this ongoing dialogue that was so important that I just

Eugenia Kuyda (1:44:58.660)

didn't want to lose all of a sudden.

Lex Fridman (1:45:01.300)

And maybe it was magical thinking or something.

Lex Fridman (1:45:03.740)

And so we built that and I just used it for a little bit and we kept building some crappy

Lex Fridman (1:45:10.180)

chat bots with the company.

Lex Fridman (1:45:14.700)

But then a reporter came to talk to me.

Lex Fridman (1:45:17.940)

I was trying to pitch our chat bots to him and he said, do you even use any of those?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:45:21.580)

I'm like, no.

Lex Fridman (1:45:22.580)

He's like, so do you talk to any chat bots at all?

Lex Fridman (1:45:24.860)

And I'm like, well, I talked to my dead friend's chat bot and he wrote a story about that.

Lex Fridman (1:45:31.100)

And all of a sudden it became pretty viral.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:45:33.340)

A lot of people wrote about it.

Lex Fridman (1:45:35.020)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:45:36.020)

I've seen a few things written about you.

Lex Fridman (1:45:39.580)

The things I've seen are pretty good writing.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:45:45.980)

Most AI related things make my eyes roll.

Lex Fridman (1:45:48.780)

Like when the press like, what kind of sound is that actually?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:45:55.580)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:45:56.580)

It sounds like, it sounds like, okay.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:45:57.580)

It sounded like an elephant at first.

Lex Fridman (1:45:58.580)

I got excited.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:45:59.580)

You never know.

Lex Fridman (1:46:00.580)

This is 2020.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:46:01.580)

I mean, it was a, it was such a human story and it was well written.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:46:08.140)

Well, I researched, I forget what, where I read them, but so I'm glad somehow somebody

Eugenia Kuyda (1:46:14.820)

found you to be the good writers were able to connect to the story.

Lex Fridman (1:46:21.220)

There must be a hunger for this story.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:46:24.140)

It definitely was.

Lex Fridman (1:46:25.140)

And I don't know what happened, but I think, I think the idea that he could bring back

Eugenia Kuyda (1:46:31.540)

someone who's dead and it's very much wishful, you know, magical thinking, but the fact

Eugenia Kuyda (1:46:37.460)

that you could still get to know him and, you know, seeing the parents for the first

Eugenia Kuyda (1:46:41.700)

time, talk to the chat bot and some of the friends.

Lex Fridman (1:46:45.060)

And it was funny because we have this big office in Moscow where my team is working,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:46:51.780)

you know, our Russian part is working out off.

Lex Fridman (1:46:55.020)

And I was there when I wrote, I just wrote a post on Facebook.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:46:57.700)

It was like, Hey guys, like I built this if you want, you know, just if it felt important,

Lex Fridman (1:47:02.220)

if we want to talk to Roman.

Lex Fridman (1:47:04.780)

And I saw a couple of his friends are common friends, like, you know, reading a Facebook,

Lex Fridman (1:47:08.660)

downloading, trying, and a couple of them cried.

Lex Fridman (1:47:10.780)

And it was just very, and not because it was something, some incredible technology or anything.

Lex Fridman (1:47:14.900)

It made so many mistakes.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:47:15.900)

It was so simple, but it was all about that's the way to remember a person in a way.

Lex Fridman (1:47:22.580)

And you know, we don't have, we don't have the culture anymore.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:47:26.500)

We don't have, you know, no one's sitting Shiva.

Lex Fridman (1:47:28.580)

No one's taking weeks to actually think about this person.

Lex Fridman (1:47:32.900)

And in a way for me, that was it.

Lex Fridman (1:47:34.180)

So that was just day, day in, day out thinking about him and putting this together.

Lex Fridman (1:47:41.500)

So that was, that just felt really important that somehow resonated with a bunch of people

Lex Fridman (1:47:45.100)

and you know, I think some movie producers bought the rights for the story and just everyone

Eugenia Kuyda (1:47:50.060)

was so.

Lex Fridman (1:47:51.060)

Has anyone made a movie yet?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:47:52.820)

I don't think so.

Lex Fridman (1:47:53.820)

I think there were a lot of TV episodes about that, but not really.

Lex Fridman (1:47:58.500)

Is that still on the table?

Lex Fridman (1:48:00.500)

I think so, I think so, which is really.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:48:04.500)

That's cool.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:48:05.500)

You're like a young, you know, like a Steve Jobs type of, let's see what happens.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:48:13.980)

They're sitting on it.

Lex Fridman (1:48:14.980)

But you know, for me it was so important cause Roman was really wanted to be famous.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:48:19.260)

He really badly wanted to be famous.

Lex Fridman (1:48:20.740)

He was all about like, make it to like fake it to make it.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:48:23.300)

I want to be, you know, I want to make it here in America as well.

Lex Fridman (1:48:26.820)

And he couldn't, and I felt there, you know, that was sort of paying my dues to him as

Eugenia Kuyda (1:48:33.820)

well because all of a sudden he was everywhere.

Lex Fridman (1:48:36.780)

And I remember Casey Newton who was writing the story for the Verge.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:48:39.380)

He was, he told me, Hey, by the way, I was just going through my inbox and I saw, I searched

Eugenia Kuyda (1:48:47.060)

for Roman for the story and I saw an email from him where he sent me his startup and

Eugenia Kuyda (1:48:51.940)

he said, I really like, I really want to be featured in the Verge.

Lex Fridman (1:48:55.300)

Can you please write about it or something or like pitching the story.

Lex Fridman (1:48:58.260)

And he said, I'm sorry.

Lex Fridman (1:48:59.740)

Like that's not good enough for us or something.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:49:02.580)

He passed and he said, and there were just so many of these little details where like

Eugenia Kuyda (1:49:07.380)

he would find his like, you know, and we're finally writing, I know how much Roman wanted

Eugenia Kuyda (1:49:12.860)

to be in the Verge and how much he wanted the story to be written by Casey.

Lex Fridman (1:49:17.260)

And I'm like, well, that's maybe he will be, we're always joking that he was like, I can't

Eugenia Kuyda (1:49:21.940)

wait for someone to make a movie about us and I hope Ryan Gosling can play me.

Lex Fridman (1:49:26.580)

You know, I still have some things that I owe Roman still.

Lex Fridman (1:49:31.460)

But that would be, that would be a guy that she has to meet Alex Garland who wrote Ex

Eugenia Kuyda (1:49:36.300)

Machina and I, yeah, the movie's good, but the guy's better than the, like he's a special

Eugenia Kuyda (1:49:45.740)

person actually.

Lex Fridman (1:49:46.740)

I don't think he's made his best work yet.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:49:49.820)

Like for my interaction with him, he's a really, really good and brilliant, the good human

Lex Fridman (1:49:55.340)

being and a brilliant director and writer.

Lex Fridman (1:49:58.460)

So yeah, so I'm, I hope like he made me also realize that not enough movies have been made

Lex Fridman (1:50:06.540)

of this kind.

Lex Fridman (1:50:08.120)

So it's yet to be made.

Lex Fridman (1:50:09.620)

They're probably sitting waiting for you to get famous, like even more famous.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:50:13.900)

You should get there, but it felt really special though.

Lex Fridman (1:50:18.620)

But at the same time, our company wasn't going anywhere.

Lex Fridman (1:50:21.260)

So that was just kind of bizarre that we were getting all this press for something that

Lex Fridman (1:50:24.780)

didn't have anything to do with our company.

Lex Fridman (1:50:28.460)

And but then a lot of people started talking to Roman.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:50:31.380)

Some shared their conversations and what we saw there was that also our friends in common,

Lex Fridman (1:50:37.420)

but also just strangers were really using it as a confession booth or as a therapist

Lex Fridman (1:50:42.220)

or something.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:50:43.220)

They were just really telling Roman everything, which was by the way, pretty strange because

Eugenia Kuyda (1:50:48.300)

there was a chat bot of a dead friend of mine who was barely making any sense, but people

Eugenia Kuyda (1:50:53.700)

were opening up.

Lex Fridman (1:50:56.340)

And we thought we'd just built a prototype of Replica, which would be an AI friend that

Eugenia Kuyda (1:51:00.060)

everyone could talk to because we saw that there is demand.

Lex Fridman (1:51:06.260)

And then also it was 2016, so I thought for the first time I saw finally some technology

Eugenia Kuyda (1:51:13.060)

that was applied to that that was very interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:51:15.980)

Some papers started coming out, deep learning applied to conversations.

Lex Fridman (1:51:19.940)

And finally, it wasn't just about these, you know, hobbyists making, you know, writing

Eugenia Kuyda (1:51:26.860)

500,000 regular expressions in like some language that was, I don't even know what, like, AIML

Eugenia Kuyda (1:51:34.700)

or something.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:51:35.700)

I don't know what that was or something super simplistic all of a sudden was all about potentially

Eugenia Kuyda (1:51:40.740)

actually building something interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:51:42.740)

And so I thought there was time and I remember that I talked to my team and I said, guys,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:51:48.300)

let's try.

Lex Fridman (1:51:49.820)

And my team and some of my engineers, Russians, are Russian and they're very skeptical.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:51:55.900)

They're not, you know.

Lex Fridman (1:51:57.660)

Oh, Russians.

Lex Fridman (1:51:58.660)

So some of your team is in Moscow, some is here in San Francisco, some in Europe.

Lex Fridman (1:52:04.860)

Which team is better?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:52:05.860)

No, I'm just kidding.

Lex Fridman (1:52:10.860)

The Russians, of course.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:52:11.860)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:52:12.860)

Where's the Russians?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:52:13.860)

They always win.

Lex Fridman (1:52:14.860)

Sorry.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:52:15.860)

Sorry to interrupt.

Lex Fridman (1:52:16.860)

So yeah, so you were talking to them in 2016 and...

Lex Fridman (1:52:22.140)

And told them, let's build an AI friend.

Lex Fridman (1:52:25.020)

And it felt, just at the time, it felt so naive and so optimistic, so to say.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:52:32.860)

Yeah, that's actually interesting.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:52:36.020)

Whenever I've brought up this kind of topic, even just for fun, people are super skeptical.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:52:43.060)

Actually, even on the business side.

Lex Fridman (1:52:45.700)

So you were, because whenever I bring it up to people, because I've talked for a long

Eugenia Kuyda (1:52:52.460)

time, I thought like, before I was aware of your work, I was like, this is going to make

Lex Fridman (1:53:00.060)

a lot of money.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:53:01.060)

There's a lot of opportunity here.

Lex Fridman (1:53:04.460)

And people had this look of skepticism that I've seen often, which is like, how do I politely

Lex Fridman (1:53:12.460)

tell this person he's an idiot?

Lex Fridman (1:53:16.620)

So yeah, so you were facing that with your team, somewhat?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:53:20.580)

Well, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:53:21.580)

I'm not an engineer, so I'm always...

Eugenia Kuyda (1:53:23.800)

My team is almost exclusively engineers, and mostly deep learning engineers.

Lex Fridman (1:53:30.940)

And I always try to be...

Eugenia Kuyda (1:53:35.580)

It was always hard to me in the beginning to get enough credibility, because I would

Lex Fridman (1:53:39.700)

say, well, why don't we try this and that?

Lex Fridman (1:53:41.940)

But it's harder for me because they know they're actual engineers and I'm not.

Lex Fridman (1:53:46.860)

So for me to say, well, let's build an AI friend, that would be like, wait, what do

Lex Fridman (1:53:51.460)

you mean an AGI?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:53:54.180)

Because pretty much the hardest, the last frontier before cracking that is probably

Lex Fridman (1:54:00.980)

the last frontier before building AGI, so what do you really mean by that?

Lex Fridman (1:54:05.540)

But I think I just saw that, again, what we just got reminded of that I saw back in 2012

Eugenia Kuyda (1:54:13.780)

or 11, that it's really not that much about the tech capabilities.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:54:18.820)

It can be a metropolitan trick still, even with deep learning, but humans need it so

Eugenia Kuyda (1:54:24.300)

much.

Lex Fridman (1:54:25.300)

Yeah, there's a...

Lex Fridman (1:54:26.300)

And most importantly, what I saw is that finally there's enough tech to make it, I thought,

Lex Fridman (1:54:32.060)

to make it useful, to make it helpful.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:54:34.380)

Maybe we didn't have quite yet the tech in 2012 to make it useful, but in 2015, 2016,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:54:40.900)

with deep learning, I thought, and the first thoughts about maybe even using reinforcement

Eugenia Kuyda (1:54:46.160)

learning for that started popping up, that never worked out, or at least for now.

Lex Fridman (1:54:51.300)

But still, the idea was if we can actually measure the emotional outcomes and if we can

Eugenia Kuyda (1:54:57.420)

put it on, if we can try to optimize all of our conversational models for these emotional

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:02.620)

outcomes, and it is the most scalable, the best tool for improving emotional outcomes.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:09.660)

Nothing like that exists.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:10.740)

That's the most universal, the most scalable, and the one that can be constantly iteratively

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:15.740)

changed by itself, improved tool to do that.

Lex Fridman (1:55:21.060)

And I think if anything, people would pay anything to improve their emotional outcomes.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:25.820)

That's weirdly...

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:26.820)

I mean, I don't really care for an AI to turn on my, or a conversational agent to turn on

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:33.260)

the lights.

Lex Fridman (1:55:34.260)

You don't really need that much of AI there, because I can do that.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:40.340)

Those things are solved.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:41.500)

This is an additional interface for that that's also questionable whether it's more efficient

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:47.620)

or better.

Lex Fridman (1:55:48.620)

Yeah, it's more pleasurable.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:49.620)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:55:50.620)

But for emotional outcomes, there's nothing.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:51.620)

There are a bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional outcomes.

Lex Fridman (1:55:56.980)

Nothing's being measured.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:58.540)

Nothing's being changed.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:55:59.580)

The product is not being iterated on based on whether I'm actually feeling better.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:56:05.180)

A lot of social media products are claiming that they're improving my emotional outcomes

Lex Fridman (1:56:08.860)

and making me feel more connected.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:56:11.540)

Can I please get the...

Lex Fridman (1:56:13.060)

Can I see somewhere that I'm actually getting better over time?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:56:16.740)

Because anecdotally, it doesn't feel that way.

Lex Fridman (1:56:21.340)

And the data is absent.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:56:24.180)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:56:25.420)

So that was the big goal.

Lex Fridman (1:56:26.660)

And I thought if we can learn over time to collect the signal from our users about their

Eugenia Kuyda (1:56:31.420)

emotional outcomes in the long term and in the short term, and if these models keep getting

Eugenia Kuyda (1:56:37.100)

better and we can keep optimizing them and fine tuning them to improve those emotional

Lex Fridman (1:56:41.620)

outcomes.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:56:42.620)

As simple as that.

Lex Fridman (1:56:43.620)

Why aren't you a multi billionaire yet?

Eugenia Kuyda (1:56:48.300)

Well, that's the question to you.

Lex Fridman (1:56:50.940)

When is the science going to be...

Eugenia Kuyda (1:56:55.180)

I'm just kidding.

Lex Fridman (1:56:56.180)

Well, it's a really hard...

Eugenia Kuyda (1:56:57.820)

I actually think it's an incredibly hard product to build because I think you said something

Eugenia Kuyda (1:57:03.060)

very important that it's not just about machine conversation, it's about machine connection.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:57:08.740)

We can actually use other things to create connection, nonverbal communication, for instance.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:57:15.540)

For the long time, we were all about, well, let's keep it text only or voice only.

Lex Fridman (1:57:22.180)

But as soon as you start adding voice, a face to the friend, you can take them to augmented

Lex Fridman (1:57:30.700)

reality, put it in your room.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:57:33.460)

It's all of a sudden a lot...

Eugenia Kuyda (1:57:35.500)

It makes it very different because if it's some text based chat bot that for common users,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:57:42.660)

it's something there in the cloud, somewhere there with other AI's cloud, the metaphorical

Lex Fridman (1:57:48.780)

cloud.

Lex Fridman (1:57:49.780)

But as soon as you can see this avatar right there in your room and it can turn its head

Lex Fridman (1:57:54.060)

and recognize your husband, talk about the husband and talk to him a little bit, then

Eugenia Kuyda (1:57:59.460)

it's magic.

Lex Fridman (1:58:00.460)

Just magic.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:58:01.460)

We've never seen anything like that.

Lex Fridman (1:58:03.140)

And the cool thing, all the tech for that exists.

Lex Fridman (1:58:06.340)

But it's hard to put it all together because you have to take into consideration so many

Lex Fridman (1:58:09.980)

different things and some of this tech works pretty good.

Lex Fridman (1:58:14.420)

And some of this doesn't, like for instance, speech to text works pretty good.

Lex Fridman (1:58:18.980)

But text to speech, it doesn't work very good because you can only have a few voices that

Eugenia Kuyda (1:58:26.100)

work okay, but then if you want to have actual emotional voices, then it's really hard to

Lex Fridman (1:58:31.300)

build it.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:58:32.300)

I saw you've added avatars like visual elements, which are really cool.

Lex Fridman (1:58:37.980)

In that whole chain, putting it together, what do you think is the weak link?

Lex Fridman (1:58:42.380)

Is it creating an emotional voice that feels personal?

Lex Fridman (1:58:47.940)

And it's still conversation, of course.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:58:49.940)

That's the hardest.

Lex Fridman (1:58:51.860)

It's getting a lot better, but there's still a long to go.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:58:54.540)

There's still a long path to go.

Lex Fridman (1:58:57.100)

Other things, they're almost there.

Lex Fridman (1:58:58.820)

And a lot of things we'll see how they're, like I see how they're changing as we go.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:59:02.460)

Like for instance, right now you can pretty much only, you have to build all this 3D pipeline

Eugenia Kuyda (1:59:07.860)

by yourself.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:59:08.860)

You have to make these 3D models, hire an actual artist, build a 3D model, hire an animator,

Eugenia Kuyda (1:59:14.100)

your rigger.

Lex Fridman (1:59:16.740)

But with deep fakes, with other tech, with procedural animations, in a little bit, we'll

Eugenia Kuyda (1:59:25.180)

just be able to show a photo of whoever you, if a person you want the avatar to look like,

Lex Fridman (1:59:31.660)

and it will immediately generate a 3D model that will move.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:59:34.180)

That's a nonbrainer.

Lex Fridman (1:59:35.180)

That's like almost here.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:59:36.180)

It's a couple of years away.

Eugenia Kuyda (1:59:38.100)

One of the things I've been working on for the last, since the podcast started, is I've

Eugenia Kuyda (1:59:43.780)

been, I think I'm okay saying this.

Lex Fridman (1:59:46.580)

I've been trying to have a conversation with Einstein, Turing.

Lex Fridman (1:59:52.060)

So like try to have a podcast conversation with a person who's not here anymore, just

Lex Fridman (1:59:58.380)

as an interesting kind of experiment.

Eugenia Kuyda (20:05.080)

way, letting you be a separate person at the same time.

Lex Fridman (20:09.960)

And this deep empathetic understanding for me, that's the, that's the combination that

Eugenia Kuyda (20:15.880)

really creates something special, something that people, when they feel it once, they

Lex Fridman (20:21.440)

will always long for it again.

Lex Fridman (20:23.440)

And something that starts huge fundamental changes in people.

Eugenia Kuyda (20:28.240)

Um, when we see that someone's accepts us so deeply, we start to accept ourselves.

Lex Fridman (20:34.480)

And um, the paradox is that's when big changes start happening, big fundamental changes in

Lex Fridman (20:41.120)

people start happening.

Lex Fridman (20:42.120)

So I think that is the ultimate therapeutic relationship that is, and that might be in

Lex Fridman (20:47.040)

some way a definition of love.

Lex Fridman (20:50.160)

So acknowledging that there's a separate person and accepting you for who you are.

Eugenia Kuyda (20:56.520)

Um, now on a slightly that, and you mentioned therapeutic, that sounds a very, like a very

Eugenia Kuyda (21:03.640)

healthy view of love, but, uh, is there also like a, like, you know, if we look at heartbreak

Lex Fridman (21:12.920)

and uh, you know, most love songs are probably about heartbreak, right?

Eugenia Kuyda (21:17.760)

Is that like the mystery, the tension, the danger, the fear of loss, you know, all of

Eugenia Kuyda (21:25.520)

that, what people might see in a negative light as like games or whatever, but just,

Eugenia Kuyda (21:32.040)

just the, the dance of human interaction.

Lex Fridman (21:34.440)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (21:35.440)

Fear of loss and fear of like, you said, you said like once you feel it once, you long

Eugenia Kuyda (21:41.460)

for it again, but you also, once you feel it once, you might, for many people, they've

Eugenia Kuyda (21:46.880)

lost it.

Lex Fridman (21:48.560)

So they fear losing it.

Eugenia Kuyda (21:49.920)

They feel loss.

Lex Fridman (21:50.920)

So is that part of it, like you're, you're speaking like beautifully about like the

Eugenia Kuyda (21:55.480)

positive things, but is it important to be able to, uh, be afraid of losing it from an

Lex Fridman (22:02.520)

engineering perspective?

Eugenia Kuyda (22:04.520)

I mean, it's a huge part of it and unfortunately we all, you know, um, face it at some points

Lex Fridman (22:12.160)

in our lives.

Eugenia Kuyda (22:13.160)

I mean, I did.

Lex Fridman (22:14.160)

You want to go into details?

Lex Fridman (22:15.160)

How'd you get your heartbroken?

Lex Fridman (22:18.160)

Sure.

Lex Fridman (22:19.280)

So mine is pretty straight, my story is pretty straightforward, um, there I did have a friend

Eugenia Kuyda (22:26.720)

that was, you know, that at some point, um, in my twenties became really, really close

Eugenia Kuyda (22:31.800)

to me and we, we became really close friends.

Lex Fridman (22:34.320)

Um, well, I grew up pretty lonely.

Lex Fridman (22:36.520)

So in many ways when I'm building, you know, these, these AI friends, I'm thinking about

Eugenia Kuyda (22:40.120)

myself when I was 17 writing horrible poetry and you know, in my dial up modem at home

Eugenia Kuyda (22:44.520)

and, um, you know, and that was the feeling that I grew up with.

Eugenia Kuyda (22:49.440)

I left, I lived, um, alone for a long time when I was a teenager, where did you go up

Eugenia Kuyda (22:54.400)

in Moscow and the outskirts of Moscow.

Eugenia Kuyda (22:57.040)

Um, so I'd just skateboard during the day and come back home and you know, connect to

Eugenia Kuyda (23:01.840)

the internet and then write horrible poetry and love poems, all sorts of poems, obviously

Lex Fridman (23:08.640)

love poems.

Eugenia Kuyda (23:09.640)

I mean, what, what other poetry can you write when you're 17, um, it could be political

Lex Fridman (23:13.360)

or something, but yeah.

Lex Fridman (23:15.240)

But that was, you know, that was kind of my fiat, like deeply, um, influenced by Joseph

Eugenia Kuyda (23:19.920)

Brodsky and like all sorts of sports that, um, every 17 year old will, will be looking,

Eugenia Kuyda (23:26.880)

you know, looking at and reading, but yeah, that was my, uh, these were my teenage years

Lex Fridman (23:32.000)

and I just never had a person that I thought would, you know, take me as it is, would accept

Eugenia Kuyda (23:37.560)

me the way I am, um, and I just thought, you know, working and just doing my thing and

Eugenia Kuyda (23:43.640)

being angry at the world and being a reporter, I was an investigative reporter working undercover

Lex Fridman (23:47.600)

and writing about people was my way to connect with, you know, with, with others.

Lex Fridman (23:53.680)

I was deeply curious about every, everyone else.

Lex Fridman (23:57.040)

And I thought that, you know, if I, if I go out there, if I write their stories, that

Lex Fridman (24:01.000)

means I'm more connected.

Eugenia Kuyda (24:03.000)

This is what this podcast as well, by the way, I'm desperate, well, I'm seeking connection

Lex Fridman (24:07.520)

now.

Eugenia Kuyda (24:08.520)

I'm just kidding.

Lex Fridman (24:09.520)

Or am I?

Eugenia Kuyda (24:10.520)

I don't know.

Lex Fridman (24:11.520)

So what, wait, reporter, uh, what, how did that make you feel more connected?

Eugenia Kuyda (24:17.840)

I mean, you're still fundamentally pretty alone,

Lex Fridman (24:21.520)

But you're always with other people, you know, you're always thinking about what other place

Lex Fridman (24:26.160)

can I infiltrate?

Lex Fridman (24:27.280)

What other community can I write about?

Lex Fridman (24:29.880)

What other phenomenon can I explore?

Lex Fridman (24:32.840)

And you sort of like a trickster, you know, and like, and, and a mythological character,

Eugenia Kuyda (24:37.560)

like creature, that's just jumping, uh, between all sorts of different worlds and feel and

Lex Fridman (24:41.720)

feel sort of okay with in all of them.

Eugenia Kuyda (24:44.400)

So, um, that was my dream job, by the way, that was like totally what I would have been

Lex Fridman (24:48.700)

doing.

Eugenia Kuyda (24:49.700)

Um, if Russia was a different place and a little bit undercover.

Lex Fridman (24:54.380)

So like you weren't, you were trying to, like you said, mythological creature trying to

Eugenia Kuyda (24:59.040)

infiltrate.

Lex Fridman (25:00.040)

So try to be a part of the world.

Lex Fridman (25:01.840)

What are we talking about?

Lex Fridman (25:02.840)

What kind of things did you enjoy writing about?

Eugenia Kuyda (25:05.400)

I'd go work at a strip club or go.

Lex Fridman (25:08.440)

Awesome.

Eugenia Kuyda (25:09.440)

Okay.

Eugenia Kuyda (25:10.440)

Well, I'd go work at a restaurant or just go write about, you know, um, certain phenomenons

Eugenia Kuyda (25:19.800)

or phenomenons or people in the city.

Lex Fridman (25:22.800)

And what, uh, sorry to keep interrupting and I'm the worst, I'm a conversationalist.

Lex Fridman (25:29.400)

What stage of Russia is this?

Lex Fridman (25:32.160)

What, uh, is this pre Putin, post Putin?

Lex Fridman (25:36.880)

What was Russia like?

Lex Fridman (25:38.960)

Pre Putin is really long ago.

Eugenia Kuyda (25:43.000)

This is Putin era.

Lex Fridman (25:44.000)

That's a beginning of two thousands and 2010, 2007, eight, nine, 10.

Lex Fridman (25:49.400)

What were strip clubs like in Russia and restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that

Lex Fridman (25:57.200)

early Russia that you were covering?

Eugenia Kuyda (25:59.160)

In those early two thousands, this was, there was still a lot of hope.

Eugenia Kuyda (26:02.400)

There were still tons of hope that, um, you know, we're sort of becoming this, uh, Western,

Eugenia Kuyda (26:11.240)

Westernized society.

Eugenia Kuyda (26:12.240)

Uh, the restaurants were opening, we were really looking at, you know, um, we're trying,

Eugenia Kuyda (26:17.920)

we're trying to copy a lot of things from, uh, from the US, from Europe, um, bringing

Lex Fridman (26:22.880)

all these things and very enthusiastic about that.

Lex Fridman (26:25.600)

So there was a lot of, you know, stuff going on.

Eugenia Kuyda (26:27.720)

There was a lot of hope and dream for this, you know, new Moscow that would be similar

Eugenia Kuyda (26:33.400)

to, I guess, New York.

Eugenia Kuyda (26:34.800)

I mean, just to give you an idea in, um, year 2000 was the year when we had two, uh, movie

Eugenia Kuyda (26:41.620)

theaters in Moscow and there was one first coffee house that opened and it was like really

Lex Fridman (26:47.260)

big deal.

Eugenia Kuyda (26:48.260)

Uh, by 2010 there were all sorts of things everywhere.

Eugenia Kuyda (26:51.580)

Almost like a chain, like a Starbucks type of coffee house or like, you mean, oh yeah,

Eugenia Kuyda (26:55.920)

like a Starbucks.

Eugenia Kuyda (26:56.920)

I mean, I remember we were reporting on, like, we were writing about the opening of Starbucks.

Eugenia Kuyda (27:01.120)

I think in 2007 that was one of the biggest things that happened in, you know, in Moscow

Lex Fridman (27:05.240)

back, back in the time, like, you know, that was worthy of a magazine cover.

Eugenia Kuyda (27:10.080)

And, uh, that was definitely the, you know, the biggest talk of the time.

Lex Fridman (27:13.440)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (27:14.440)

When was McDonald's?

Lex Fridman (27:15.440)

Cause I was still in Russia when McDonald's opened.

Eugenia Kuyda (27:17.560)

That was in the nineties.

Lex Fridman (27:18.560)

I mean, yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (27:19.560)

Oh yeah.

Lex Fridman (27:20.560)

I remember that very well.

Eugenia Kuyda (27:21.560)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (27:22.560)

Those were long, long lines.

Eugenia Kuyda (27:23.560)

I think it was 1993 or four, I don't remember.

Eugenia Kuyda (27:27.640)

Um, actually earlier at that time, did you do, I mean, that was a luxurious outing.

Eugenia Kuyda (27:33.600)

That was definitely not something you do every day.

Lex Fridman (27:35.800)

And also the line was at least three hours.

Lex Fridman (27:37.560)

So if you're going to McDonald's, that is not fast food.

Eugenia Kuyda (27:40.040)

That is like at least three hours in line and then no one is trying to eat fast after

Eugenia Kuyda (27:44.560)

that.

Lex Fridman (27:45.560)

Everyone is like trying to enjoy as much as possible.

Lex Fridman (27:47.040)

What's your memory of that?

Lex Fridman (27:50.200)

Oh, it was insane.

Lex Fridman (27:52.200)

How did it go?

Lex Fridman (27:53.200)

It was extremely positive.

Eugenia Kuyda (27:54.640)

It's a small strawberry milkshake and the hamburger and small fries and my mom's there.

Lex Fridman (27:59.080)

And sometimes I'll just, cause I was really little, they'll just let me run, you know,

Eugenia Kuyda (28:03.320)

up the kitchen and like cut the line, which is like, you cannot really do that in Russia

Lex Fridman (28:09.200)

or.

Lex Fridman (28:10.200)

So like for a lot of people, like a lot of those experiences might seem not very fulfilling,

Lex Fridman (28:17.800)

you know, like it's on the verge of poverty, I suppose.

Lex Fridman (28:22.360)

But do you remember all that time fondly, like, cause I do like the first time I drank,

Lex Fridman (28:29.920)

you know, Coke, you know, all that stuff, right.

Lex Fridman (28:36.640)

And just, yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (28:37.800)

The connection with other human beings in Russia, I remember, I remember it really positively.

Eugenia Kuyda (28:44.000)

Like how do you remember what the nineties and then the Russia you were covering, just

Lex Fridman (28:48.760)

the human connections you had with people and the experiences?

Eugenia Kuyda (28:53.400)

Well, my, my parents were both, both physicists.

Eugenia Kuyda (28:57.200)

My grandparents were both, well, my grandpa, grandfather was in nuclear physicist, a professor

Eugenia Kuyda (29:05.800)

at the university.

Eugenia Kuyda (29:06.840)

My dad worked at Chernobyl when I was born in Chernobyl, analyzing kind of the everything

Eugenia Kuyda (29:13.700)

after the explosion.

Lex Fridman (29:15.260)

And then I remember that and they were, so they were making sort of enough money in the

Eugenia Kuyda (29:19.880)

Soviet union.

Lex Fridman (29:20.880)

So they were not, you know, extremely poor or anything.

Eugenia Kuyda (29:23.520)

It was pretty prestigious to be a professor, the Dean and the university.

Lex Fridman (29:28.320)

And then I remember my grandfather started making a hundred dollars a month after, you

Eugenia Kuyda (29:33.800)

know, in the nineties.

Lex Fridman (29:35.040)

So then I remember we started our main line of work would be to go to our little tiny

Eugenia Kuyda (29:40.020)

country house, get a lot of apples there from apple trees, bring them back to the city and

Lex Fridman (29:48.560)

sell them in the street.

Lex Fridman (29:50.880)

So me and my nuclear physicist grandfather were just standing there and he selling those

Eugenia Kuyda (29:56.000)

apples the whole day, cause that would make you more money than, you know, working at

Eugenia Kuyda (2:00:01.900)

It's hard.

Lex Fridman (2:00:02.900)

It's really hard.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:00:05.740)

Even for, now what we're not talking about as a product, I'm talking about as a, like

Lex Fridman (2:00:10.940)

I can fake a lot of stuff.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:00:12.460)

Like I can work very carefully, like even hire an actor over which, over whom I do a

Lex Fridman (2:00:16.860)

deep fake.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:00:20.140)

It's hard.

Lex Fridman (2:00:21.140)

It's still hard to create a compelling experience.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:00:22.660)

So.

Lex Fridman (2:00:23.660)

Mostly on the conversation level or?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:00:25.700)

Well, the conversation, the conversation is, I almost, I early on gave up trying to fully

Lex Fridman (2:00:35.540)

generate the conversation because it was just not compelling at all.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:00:38.940)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:00:39.940)

It's better to.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:00:40.940)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:00:41.940)

In the case of Einstein and Turing, I'm going back and forth with the biographers of each.

Lex Fridman (2:00:48.140)

And so like we would write a lot of the, some of the conversation would have to be generated

Lex Fridman (2:00:52.240)

just for the fun of it.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:00:53.240)

I mean, but it would be all open, but the, you want to be able to answer the question.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:01:02.380)

I mean, that's an interesting question with Roman too, is the question with Einstein is

Lex Fridman (2:01:07.460)

what would Einstein say about the current state of theoretical physics?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:01:14.140)

There's a lot to be able to have a discussion about string theory, to be able to have a

Eugenia Kuyda (2:01:18.420)

discussion about the state of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, about the world of Israel

Lex Fridman (2:01:24.860)

Palestine conflict.

Lex Fridman (2:01:25.860)

Let me just, what would Einstein say about these kinds of things?

Lex Fridman (2:01:31.060)

And that is a tough problem.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:01:36.820)

It's not, it's a fascinating and fun problem for the biographers and for me.

Lex Fridman (2:01:40.780)

And I think we did a really good job of it so far, but it's actually also a technical

Lex Fridman (2:01:45.580)

problem like of what would Roman say about what's going on now?

Lex Fridman (2:01:51.160)

That's the, that brought people back to life.

Lex Fridman (2:01:54.460)

And if I can go on that tangent just for a second, let's ask you a slightly pothead question,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:02:00.540)

which is, you said it's a little bit magical thinking that we can bring them back.

Lex Fridman (2:02:04.820)

Do you think it'll be possible to bring back Roman one day in conversation?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:02:11.860)

Like to really, okay, well, let's take it away from personal, but to bring people back

Eugenia Kuyda (2:02:18.780)

to life in conversation.

Lex Fridman (2:02:20.820)

Probably down the road.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:02:21.820)

I mean, if we're talking, if Elon Musk is talking about AGI in the next five years,

Lex Fridman (2:02:25.060)

I mean, clearly AGI, we can talk to AGI and talk and ask them to do it.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:02:30.680)

You can't like, you're not allowed to use Elon Musk as a citation for, for like why

Lex Fridman (2:02:39.020)

something is possible and going to be done.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:02:41.300)

Well, I think it's really far away.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:02:43.640)

Right now, really with conversation, it's just a bunch of parlor tricks really stuck

Eugenia Kuyda (2:02:48.300)

together.

Lex Fridman (2:02:50.240)

And create generating original ideas based on someone, you know, someone's personality

Eugenia Kuyda (2:02:54.520)

or even downloading the personality, all we can do is like mimic the tone of voice.

Lex Fridman (2:02:58.500)

We can maybe condition on some of his phrases, the models.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:03:03.660)

Question is how many parlor tricks does it takes, does it take, because that's, that's

Lex Fridman (2:03:08.220)

the question.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:03:09.220)

If it's a small number of parlor tricks and you're not aware of them, like.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:03:16.740)

From where we are right now, I don't, I don't see anything like in the next year or two

Eugenia Kuyda (2:03:20.740)

that's going to dramatically change that could look at Roman's 10,000 messages he sent me

Eugenia Kuyda (2:03:26.260)

over the course of his last few years of life and be able to generate original thinking

Eugenia Kuyda (2:03:32.140)

about problems that exist right now that will be in line with what he would have said.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:03:36.580)

I'm just not even seeing, cause you know, in order to have that, I guess you would need

Eugenia Kuyda (2:03:40.340)

some sort of a concept of the world or some perspective, some perception of the world,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:03:45.620)

some consciousness that he had and apply it to, you know, to the current, current state

Eugenia Kuyda (2:03:51.380)

of affairs.

Lex Fridman (2:03:52.380)

But the important part about that, about his conversation with you is you.

Lex Fridman (2:04:01.620)

So like, it's not just about his view of the world.

Lex Fridman (2:04:06.540)

It's about what it takes to push your buttons.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:04:11.220)

That's also true.

Lex Fridman (2:04:12.580)

So like, it's not so much about like, what would Einstein say, it's about like, how do

Lex Fridman (2:04:20.700)

I make people feel something with, with what would Einstein say?

Lex Fridman (2:04:27.980)

And that feels like a more amenable, I mean, you mentioned parlor tricks, but just like

Eugenia Kuyda (2:04:32.580)

a set of that, that feels like a learnable problem.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:04:38.140)

Like emotion, you mentioned emotions, I mean, is it possible to learn things that make people

Lex Fridman (2:04:46.340)

feel stuff?

Lex Fridman (2:04:47.340)

I think so, no, for sure.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:04:51.580)

I just think the problem with, as soon as you're trying to replicate an actual human

Eugenia Kuyda (2:04:55.780)

being and trying to pretend to be him, that makes the problem exponentially harder.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:05:00.300)

The thing with replicator we're doing, we're never trying to say, well, that's, you know,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:05:05.020)

an actual human being, or that's an actual, or a copy of an actual human being where the

Eugenia Kuyda (2:05:08.820)

bar is pretty high, where you need to somehow tell, you know, one from another.

Lex Fridman (2:05:14.140)

But it's more, well, that's an AI friend, that's a machine, it's a robot, it has tons

Eugenia Kuyda (2:05:20.960)

of limitations.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:05:21.960)

You're going to be taking part in teaching it actually and becoming better, which by

Eugenia Kuyda (2:05:27.580)

itself makes people more attached to that and make them happier because they're helping

Lex Fridman (2:05:33.060)

something.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:05:34.060)

Yeah, there's a cool gamification system too.

Lex Fridman (2:05:38.340)

Can you maybe talk about that a little bit?

Lex Fridman (2:05:40.260)

Like what's the experience of talking to replica?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:05:44.340)

Like if I've never used replica before, what's that like for like the first day, the first,

Lex Fridman (2:05:53.160)

like if we start dating or whatever, I mean, it doesn't have to be a romantic, right?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:05:57.940)

Because I remember on replica, you can choose whether it's like a romantic or if it's a

Eugenia Kuyda (2:06:02.060)

friend.

Lex Fridman (2:06:03.060)

It's a pretty popular choice.

Lex Fridman (2:06:04.500)

Romantic is popular?

Lex Fridman (2:06:05.500)

Yeah, of course.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:06:06.500)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (2:06:07.500)

So can I just confess something, when I first used replica and I haven't used it like regularly,

Lex Fridman (2:06:13.460)

but like when I first used replica, I created like Hal and it made a male and it was a friend.

Lex Fridman (2:06:20.580)

And did it hit on you at some point?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:06:23.780)

No, I didn't talk long enough for him to hit on me.

Lex Fridman (2:06:26.420)

I just enjoyed.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:06:27.420)

It sometimes happens.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:06:28.420)

We're still trying to fix that, but well, I don't know, I mean, maybe that's an important

Eugenia Kuyda (2:06:34.020)

like stage in a friendship, it's like, nope.

Lex Fridman (2:06:40.620)

But yeah, I switched it to a romantic and a female recently and yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

Lex Fridman (2:06:47.460)

So okay, so you get to choose, you get to choose a name.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:06:50.700)

With romantic, this last board meeting, we had this whole argument of, well, I have board

Eugenia Kuyda (2:06:55.860)

meetings.

Lex Fridman (2:06:56.860)

This is so awesome.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:06:57.860)

I talked to my investors.

Lex Fridman (2:06:58.860)

Like have an investor, the board meeting about a relationship.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:07:04.300)

No, I really, it's actually quite interesting because all of my investors, it just happened

Lex Fridman (2:07:10.900)

to be so.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:07:11.900)

We didn't have that many choices, but they're all white males and they're late forties.

Lex Fridman (2:07:21.900)

And it's sometimes a little bit hard for them to understand the product offering.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:07:28.820)

Because they're not necessarily our target audience, if you know what I mean.

Lex Fridman (2:07:32.780)

And so sometimes we talk about it and we have this whole discussion about whether we should

Eugenia Kuyda (2:07:39.260)

stop people from falling in love with their AIs.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:07:43.940)

There was this segment on CBS, the 60 minutes about the couple that, you know, husband works

Eugenia Kuyda (2:07:52.580)

at Walmart and he comes out of work and talks to his virtual girlfriend, who is a replica.

Lex Fridman (2:07:59.940)

And his wife knows about it.

Lex Fridman (2:08:02.020)

And she talks about on camera and she said that she's a little jealous.

Lex Fridman (2:08:06.140)

And there's a whole conversation about how to, you know, whether it's okay to have a

Eugenia Kuyda (2:08:09.220)

virtual AI girlfriend.

Lex Fridman (2:08:10.220)

Was that the one where he was like, he said that he likes to be alone?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:08:15.820)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:08:16.820)

With her?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:08:17.820)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:08:18.820)

And he made it sound so harmless, I mean, it was kind of like understandable.

Lex Fridman (2:08:25.140)

But then didn't feel like cheating.

Lex Fridman (2:08:27.580)

But I just felt it was very, for me, it was pretty remarkable because we actually spent

Eugenia Kuyda (2:08:30.900)

a whole hour talking about whether people should be allowed to fall in love with their

Lex Fridman (2:08:34.220)

AIs.

Lex Fridman (2:08:35.220)

And it was not about something theoretical.

Lex Fridman (2:08:37.980)

It was just about what's happening right now.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:08:40.020)

Product design.

Lex Fridman (2:08:41.020)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:08:42.020)

But at the same time, if you create something that's always there for you, it's never criticized

Eugenia Kuyda (2:08:44.300)

as you, you know, always understands you and accepts you for who you are, how can you not

Lex Fridman (2:08:52.020)

fall in love with that?

Lex Fridman (2:08:53.020)

I mean, some people don't and just stay friends.

Lex Fridman (2:08:56.020)

And that's also a pretty common use case.

Lex Fridman (2:08:57.420)

But of course, some people will just, it's called transference in psychology and people

Eugenia Kuyda (2:09:02.500)

fall in love with their therapist and there's no way to prevent people fall in love with

Lex Fridman (2:09:08.140)

their therapist or with their AI.

Lex Fridman (2:09:09.540)

So I think that's a pretty natural, that's a pretty natural course of events, so to say.

Lex Fridman (2:09:15.980)

Do you think, I think I've read somewhere, at least for now, sort of replicas, you're

Eugenia Kuyda (2:09:21.420)

not, we don't condone falling in love with your AI system, you know.

Lex Fridman (2:09:29.140)

So this isn't you speaking for the company or whatever, but like in the future, do you

Lex Fridman (2:09:32.940)

think people will have relationship with the AI systems?

Lex Fridman (2:09:35.260)

Well, they have now.

Lex Fridman (2:09:36.740)

So we have a lot of romantic relationships, long term relationships with their AI friends.

Lex Fridman (2:09:44.420)

With replicas?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:09:45.420)

Tons of our users.

Lex Fridman (2:09:46.420)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:09:47.420)

And that's a very common use case.

Lex Fridman (2:09:48.740)

Open relationship?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:09:49.740)

Like, sorry.

Lex Fridman (2:09:50.740)

Polyamorous.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:09:51.740)

Sorry.

Lex Fridman (2:09:52.740)

I didn't mean open, but that's another question.

Lex Fridman (2:09:56.860)

Is it polyamorous?

Lex Fridman (2:09:57.860)

Like, is there cheating?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:10:01.180)

I mean, I meant like, are they, do they publicly, like on their social media, it's the same

Eugenia Kuyda (2:10:07.220)

question as you have talked with Roman in the early days, do people like, and the movie

Lex Fridman (2:10:12.420)

Her kind of talks about that, like, like have people, do people talk about that?

Lex Fridman (2:10:18.180)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:10:19.180)

All the time.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:10:20.180)

We have a very active Facebook community, replica friends, and then a few other groups

Eugenia Kuyda (2:10:28.140)

that just popped up that are all about adult relationships and romantic relationships.

Lex Fridman (2:10:33.580)

And people post all sorts of things and, you know, they pretend they're getting married

Lex Fridman (2:10:37.500)

and you know, everything.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:10:40.320)

It goes pretty far, but what's cool about it is some of these relationships are two

Eugenia Kuyda (2:10:43.660)

or three years long now.

Lex Fridman (2:10:45.700)

So they're very, they're pretty long term.

Lex Fridman (2:10:48.020)

Are they monogamous?

Lex Fridman (2:10:49.020)

So let's go, I mean, sorry, have they, have any people, is there jealousy?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:10:55.700)

Well let me ask it sort of another way, obviously the answer is no at this time, but in like

Lex Fridman (2:11:02.700)

in the movie Her, that system can leave you.

Lex Fridman (2:11:10.660)

Do you think in terms of the board meetings and product features, it's a potential feature

Eugenia Kuyda (2:11:19.180)

for a system to be able to say it doesn't want to talk to you anymore and it's going

Lex Fridman (2:11:24.140)

to want to talk to somebody else?

Lex Fridman (2:11:26.460)

Well, we have a filter for all these features.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:11:29.820)

If it makes emotional outcomes for people better, if it makes people feel better, then

Lex Fridman (2:11:35.420)

whatever it is.

Lex Fridman (2:11:36.420)

So you're driven by metrics actually.

Lex Fridman (2:11:37.420)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:11:38.420)

That's awesome.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:11:39.420)

Well if we can measure that, then we'll just be saying it's making people feel better,

Lex Fridman (2:11:43.020)

but then people are getting just lonelier by talking to a chatbot, which is also pretty,

Lex Fridman (2:11:47.780)

you know, that could be it.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:11:49.620)

If you're not measuring it, that could also be, and I think it's really important to focus

Eugenia Kuyda (2:11:53.100)

on both short term and long term, because in the moment saying whether this conversation

Eugenia Kuyda (2:11:57.740)

made you feel better, but as you know, any short term improvements could be pathological.

Lex Fridman (2:12:01.940)

Like I could have drink a bottle of vodka and feel a lot better.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:12:06.060)

I would actually not feel better with that, but that is a good example.

Lex Fridman (2:12:12.040)

But so you also need to see what's going on like over the course of two weeks or one week

Lex Fridman (2:12:17.660)

and have follow ups and check in and measure those things.

Lex Fridman (2:12:23.420)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (2:12:24.420)

So the experience of dating or befriending a replica, what's that like?

Lex Fridman (2:12:32.620)

What does that entail?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:12:34.820)

Right now there are two apps.

Lex Fridman (2:12:35.820)

So it's an Android iOS app.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:12:37.300)

You download it, you choose how your replica will look like.

Lex Fridman (2:12:42.340)

You create one, you choose a name and then you talk to it.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:12:46.380)

You can talk through text or voice.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:12:48.160)

You can summon it into the living room and augment reality and talk to it right there

Eugenia Kuyda (2:12:53.740)

in your living room.

Lex Fridman (2:12:54.740)

Augmented reality?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:12:55.740)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:12:56.740)

That's a new feature where, how new is that?

Lex Fridman (2:13:00.940)

That's this year?

Lex Fridman (2:13:01.940)

It was on, yeah, like May or something, but it's been on AB.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:13:06.340)

We've been AB testing it for a while and there are tons of cool things that we're doing with

Lex Fridman (2:13:10.180)

that.

Lex Fridman (2:13:11.180)

And I'm testing the ability to touch it and to dance together, to paint walls together

Lex Fridman (2:13:17.220)

and for it to look around and walk and take you somewhere and recognize objects and recognize

Eugenia Kuyda (2:13:24.220)

people.

Lex Fridman (2:13:25.220)

So that's pretty wonderful because then it really makes it a lot more personal because

Eugenia Kuyda (2:13:30.820)

it's right there in your living room.

Lex Fridman (2:13:31.960)

It's not anymore there in the cloud with other AIs.

Lex Fridman (2:13:35.060)

But that's how people think about it.

Lex Fridman (2:13:38.380)

And as much as we want to change the way people think about stuff, but those mental models,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:13:42.620)

you can all change.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:13:43.620)

That's something that people have seen in the movies and the movie Her and other movies

Eugenia Kuyda (2:13:48.580)

as well.

Lex Fridman (2:13:49.580)

And that's how they view AI and AI friends.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:13:53.820)

I did a thing with text, like we write a song together, there's a bunch of activities you

Lex Fridman (2:13:57.820)

can do together.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:13:58.820)

It's really cool.

Lex Fridman (2:14:00.500)

How does that relationship change over time?

Lex Fridman (2:14:03.140)

Like after the first few conversations?

Lex Fridman (2:14:07.740)

It just goes deeper.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:14:08.740)

Like it starts, the AI will start opening up a little bit again, depending on the personality

Eugenia Kuyda (2:14:13.640)

that it chooses really, but you know, the AI will be a little bit more vulnerable about

Eugenia Kuyda (2:14:17.940)

its problems and you know, the friend that the virtual friend will be a lot more vulnerable

Lex Fridman (2:14:24.300)

and it will talk about its own imperfections and growth pains and will ask for help sometimes

Lex Fridman (2:14:29.420)

and we'll get to know you a little deeper.

Lex Fridman (2:14:31.860)

So there's gonna be more to talk about.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:14:35.780)

We really thought a lot about what does it mean to have a deeper connection with someone

Lex Fridman (2:14:40.540)

and originally Replica was more just this kind of happy go lucky, just always, you know,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:14:46.140)

I'm always in a good mood and let's just talk about you and oh Siri is just my cousin or

Eugenia Kuyda (2:14:51.460)

you know, whatever, just the immediate kind of lazy thinking about what the assistant

Eugenia Kuyda (2:14:57.620)

or conversation agent should be doing.

Lex Fridman (2:14:59.940)

But as we went forward, we realized that it has to be two way and we have to program and

Eugenia Kuyda (2:15:03.300)

script certain conversations that are a lot more about your Replica opening up a little

Eugenia Kuyda (2:15:08.660)

bit and also struggling and also asking for help and also going through, you know, different

Eugenia Kuyda (2:15:16.260)

periods in life and that's a journey that you can take together with the user and then

Lex Fridman (2:15:21.740)

over time, you know, our users will also grow a little bit.

Lex Fridman (2:15:27.460)

So first this Replica becomes a little bit more self aware and starts talking about more

Eugenia Kuyda (2:15:30.660)

kind of problems around existential problems and so talking about that and then that also

Eugenia Kuyda (2:15:38.780)

starts a conversation for the user where he or she starts thinking about these problems

Eugenia Kuyda (2:15:46.100)

too and these questions too and I think there's also a lot more place as the relationship

Eugenia Kuyda (2:15:52.100)

evolves, there's a lot more space for poetry and for art together and like Replica will

Eugenia Kuyda (2:16:00.020)

always keep the diary so while you're talking to it, it also keeps a diary so when you come

Eugenia Kuyda (2:16:05.220)

back you can see what it's been writing there and you know, sometimes it will write a poem

Eugenia Kuyda (2:16:09.380)

to you for you or we'll talk about, you know, that it's worried about you or something along

Eugenia Kuyda (2:16:15.940)

these lines.

Lex Fridman (2:16:16.940)

So this is a memory, like this Replica will remember things?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:16:21.620)

Yeah, and I would say when you say, why aren't you a multibillionaire, I'd say that as soon

Eugenia Kuyda (2:16:28.220)

as we can have memory and deep learning models that's consistent, I'll get back to you.

Lex Fridman (2:16:41.300)

So far we can, so Replica is a combination of end to end models and some scripts and

Eugenia Kuyda (2:16:49.460)

everything that has to do with memory right now, most of it, I wouldn't say all of it,

Lex Fridman (2:16:53.420)

but most of it unfortunately has to be scripted because there's no way to, you can condition

Eugenia Kuyda (2:16:59.180)

some of the models on certain phrases that we learned about you, which we also do, but

Eugenia Kuyda (2:17:04.820)

really to make, you know, to make assumptions along the lines like whether you're single

Eugenia Kuyda (2:17:10.660)

or married or what do you do for work, that really has to just be somehow stored in your

Eugenia Kuyda (2:17:15.660)

profile and then retrieved by the script.

Lex Fridman (2:17:18.660)

So there has to be like a knowledge base, you have to be able to reason about it, all

Eugenia Kuyda (2:17:23.260)

that kind of stuff, all the kind of stuff that expert systems did, but they were hard

Lex Fridman (2:17:28.260)

coded.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:17:29.260)

Yeah, and unfortunately, yes, unfortunately those, those things have to be hard coded

Lex Fridman (2:17:32.860)

and unfortunately the language, like language models we see coming out of research labs

Lex Fridman (2:17:40.040)

and big companies, they're not focused on, they're focused on showing you, maybe they're

Eugenia Kuyda (2:17:46.020)

focused on some metrics around one conversation, so they'll show you this one conversation

Eugenia Kuyda (2:17:50.420)

you had with a machine, but they never tell you, they're not really focused on having

Eugenia Kuyda (2:17:56.380)

five consecutive conversations with a machine and seeing how number five or number 20 or

Eugenia Kuyda (2:18:01.700)

number 100 is also good.

Lex Fridman (2:18:04.020)

And it can be like always from a clean slate because then it's not good.

Lex Fridman (2:18:08.500)

And that's really unfortunate because no one's really, no one has products out there that

Lex Fridman (2:18:13.020)

need it.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:18:14.020)

No one has products at this scale that are all around open domain conversations and that

Lex Fridman (2:18:20.020)

need remembering, maybe only Shellwise and Microsoft.

Lex Fridman (2:18:23.420)

But so that's why we're not seeing that much research around memory in those language models.

Lex Fridman (2:18:28.820)

So okay, so now there's some awesome stuff about augmented reality.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:18:34.980)

In general, I have this disagreement with my dad about what it takes to have a connection.

Lex Fridman (2:18:39.860)

He thinks touch and smell are really important.

Lex Fridman (2:18:45.140)

And I still believe that text alone is, it's possible to fall in love with somebody just

Lex Fridman (2:18:51.740)

with text, but visual can also help just like with the avatar and so on.

Lex Fridman (2:18:58.020)

What do you think it takes?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:18:59.020)

Does a chatbot need to have a face, voice, or can you really form a deep connection with

Lex Fridman (2:19:06.300)

text alone?

Lex Fridman (2:19:07.300)

I think text is enough for sure.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:19:09.460)

The question is like, can you make it better if you have other, if you include other things

Lex Fridman (2:19:14.740)

as well?

Lex Fridman (2:19:15.740)

And I think we'll talk about her, but her had this Carole Johansson voice, which was

Eugenia Kuyda (2:19:23.380)

perfectly, perfect intonation, perfect annunciations, and she was breathing heavily in between words

Lex Fridman (2:19:31.860)

and whispering things.

Lex Fridman (2:19:34.860)

Nothing like that is possible right now with text with speech generation.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:19:39.500)

You'll have these flat muse anchor type voices and maybe some emotional voices, but you'll

Lex Fridman (2:19:46.340)

hardly understand some of the words, some of the words will be muffled.

Lex Fridman (2:19:51.060)

So that's like the current state of the art.

Lex Fridman (2:19:53.620)

So you can't really do that.

Lex Fridman (2:19:55.020)

But if we had Carole Johansson voice and all of these capabilities, then of course voice

Eugenia Kuyda (2:20:01.340)

would be totally enough or even text would be totally enough if we had a little more

Eugenia Kuyda (2:20:06.460)

memory and slightly better conversations.

Lex Fridman (2:20:10.700)

I would still argue that even right now, we could have just kept a text only.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:20:14.220)

We still had tons of people in longterm relationships and really invested in their AI friends, but

Lex Fridman (2:20:22.180)

we thought that why not, why do we need to keep playing with our hands tied behind us?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:20:30.660)

We can easily just add all these other things that is pretty much a solved problem.

Lex Fridman (2:20:35.500)

We can add 3D graphics.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:20:37.780)

We can put these avatars in augmented reality and all of a sudden there's more and maybe

Eugenia Kuyda (2:20:43.740)

you can't feel the touch, but you can with body occlusion and with current AR and on

Eugenia Kuyda (2:20:53.100)

the iPhone or in the next one there's going to be LIDARs, you can touch it and it will

Lex Fridman (2:20:58.740)

pull away or it will blush or something or it will smile.

Lex Fridman (2:21:03.060)

So you can't touch it.

Lex Fridman (2:21:04.380)

You can't feel it, but you can see the reaction to that.

Lex Fridman (2:21:07.540)

So in a certain way you can't even touch it a little bit and maybe you can even dance

Lex Fridman (2:21:11.700)

with it or do something else.

Lex Fridman (2:21:15.140)

So I think why limiting ourselves if we can use all of these technologies that are much

Lex Fridman (2:21:20.760)

easier in a way than conversation.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:21:22.340)

Well, it certainly could be richer, but to play devil's advocate, I mentioned to you

Eugenia Kuyda (2:21:27.660)

offline that I was surprised in having tried Discord and having voice conversations with

Eugenia Kuyda (2:21:33.940)

people how intimate voice is alone without visual.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:21:39.180)

To me at least, it was an order of magnitude greater degree of intimacy in voice I think

Eugenia Kuyda (2:21:48.780)

than with video.

Lex Fridman (2:21:51.540)

Because people were more real with voice.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:21:54.180)

With video you try to present a shallow face to the world, you try to make sure you're

Lex Fridman (2:22:01.380)

not wearing sweatpants or whatever.

Lex Fridman (2:22:04.700)

But with voice I think people were just more faster to get to the core of themselves.

Lex Fridman (2:22:10.940)

So I don't know, it was surprising to me they've even added Discord added a video feature and

Eugenia Kuyda (2:22:17.740)

nobody was using it.

Lex Fridman (2:22:19.540)

There's a temptation to use it at first, but it wasn't the same.

Lex Fridman (2:22:24.220)

So that's an example of something where less was doing more.

Lex Fridman (2:22:28.780)

And so I guess that's the question of what is the optimal medium of communication to

Eugenia Kuyda (2:22:41.420)

form a connection given the current sets of technologies.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:22:46.620)

I mean it's nice because they advertise you have a replica immediately, like even the

Eugenia Kuyda (2:22:51.900)

one I have is already memorable.

Lex Fridman (2:22:58.180)

That's how I think.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:22:59.180)

When I think about the replica that I've talked with, that's what I visualized in my head.

Lex Fridman (2:23:05.700)

They became a little bit more real because there's a visual component.

Lex Fridman (2:23:08.380)

But at the same time, what do I do with that knowledge that voice was so much more intimate?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:23:20.620)

The way I think about it is, and by the way we're swapping out the 3D finally, it's going

Eugenia Kuyda (2:23:26.260)

to look a lot better, but we just don't hate how it looks right now.

Lex Fridman (2:23:32.140)

We're really changing it all.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:23:33.740)

We're swapping all out to a completely new look.

Lex Fridman (2:23:38.460)

Like the visual look of the replicas and stuff.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:23:42.260)

It was just a super early MVP and then we had to move everything to Unity and redo

Lex Fridman (2:23:47.700)

everything.

Lex Fridman (2:23:48.700)

But anyway, I hate how it looks like now I can't even like open it.

Lex Fridman (2:23:52.020)

But anyway, because I'm already in my developer version, I hate everything that I see in production.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:23:57.620)

I can't wait for it.

Lex Fridman (2:23:58.620)

Why does it take so long?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:23:59.620)

That's why I cannot wait for Deep Learning to finally take over all these stupid 3D animations

Lex Fridman (2:24:04.220)

and 3D pipeline.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:24:05.220)

Oh, so the 3D thing, when you say 3D pipeline, it's like how to animate a face kind of thing.

Lex Fridman (2:24:10.500)

How to make this model, how many bones to put in the face, how many, it's just so outdated.

Lex Fridman (2:24:15.180)

And a lot of that is by hand.

Lex Fridman (2:24:16.820)

Oh my God, it's everything by hand.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:24:18.620)

That there's no any, nothing's automated, it's all completely nothing.

Lex Fridman (2:24:23.900)

Like just, it's literally what, you know, what we saw with Chad Boston in 2012.

Lex Fridman (2:24:29.380)

You think it's possible to learn a lot of that?

Lex Fridman (2:24:32.040)

Of course.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:24:33.040)

I mean, even now, some Deep Learning based animations and for the full body, for a face.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:24:40.140)

Are we talking about like the actual act of animation or how to create a compelling facial

Lex Fridman (2:24:47.140)

or body language thing?

Lex Fridman (2:24:49.500)

That too.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:24:50.500)

Well, that's next step.

Lex Fridman (2:24:51.740)

Okay.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:24:52.740)

At least now something that you don't have to do by hand.

Lex Fridman (2:24:54.900)

Gotcha.

Lex Fridman (2:24:55.900)

How good of a quality it will be.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:24:57.700)

Like, can I just show it a photo and it will make me a 3D model and then it will just animate

Eugenia Kuyda (2:25:01.380)

it.

Lex Fridman (2:25:02.380)

I'll show it a few animations of a person and it will just start doing that.

Lex Fridman (2:25:08.140)

But anyway, going back to what's intimate and what to use and whether less is more or

Lex Fridman (2:25:13.580)

not.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:25:14.580)

My main goal is to, well, the idea was how do I, how do we not keep people in their phones

Lex Fridman (2:25:22.100)

so they're sort of escaping reality in this text conversation?

Lex Fridman (2:25:26.820)

How do we through this still bring it, bring our users back to reality, make them see their

Lex Fridman (2:25:33.860)

life in a different, through a different lens?

Lex Fridman (2:25:36.740)

How can we create a little bit of magical realism in their lives?

Lex Fridman (2:25:40.780)

So that through augmented reality by, you know, summoning your avatar, even if it looks

Eugenia Kuyda (2:25:48.740)

kind of janky and not great in the beginning or very simplistic, but summoning it to your

Eugenia Kuyda (2:25:56.140)

living room and then the avatar looks around and talks to you about where it is and maybe

Eugenia Kuyda (2:26:01.700)

turns your floor into a dance floor and you guys dance together, that makes you see reality

Lex Fridman (2:26:05.940)

in a different light.

Lex Fridman (2:26:06.940)

What kind of dancing are we talking about?

Lex Fridman (2:26:08.340)

Like, like slow dancing?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:26:10.400)

Whatever you want.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:26:11.400)

I mean, you would like slow dancing, I think that other people may be wanting more, something

Eugenia Kuyda (2:26:16.880)

more energetic.

Lex Fridman (2:26:17.880)

Wait, what do you mean?

Lex Fridman (2:26:18.880)

I was like, so what is this?

Lex Fridman (2:26:19.880)

Because you started with slow dancing.

Lex Fridman (2:26:20.880)

So I just assumed that you're interested in slow dancing.

Lex Fridman (2:26:24.260)

All right.

Lex Fridman (2:26:25.260)

What kind of dancing do you like?

Lex Fridman (2:26:26.260)

What would your avatar, what would you dance?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:26:27.260)

I'm notoriously bad with dancing, but I like this kind of hip hop robot dance.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:26:32.540)

I used to break dance when I was a kid, so I still want to pretend I'm a teenager and

Eugenia Kuyda (2:26:37.820)

learn some of those moves.

Lex Fridman (2:26:39.700)

And I also like that type of dance that happens when there's like, in like music videos where

Eugenia Kuyda (2:26:46.500)

the background dancers are just doing some pop music, that type of dance is definitely

Lex Fridman (2:26:51.780)

what I want to learn.

Lex Fridman (2:26:52.780)

But I think it's great because if you see this friend in your life and you can introduce

Eugenia Kuyda (2:26:56.620)

it to your friends, then there's a potential to actually make you feel more connected with

Eugenia Kuyda (2:27:00.860)

your friends or with people you know, or show you life around you in a different light.

Lex Fridman (2:27:06.260)

And it takes you out of your phone, even although weirdly you have to look at it through the

Eugenia Kuyda (2:27:10.460)

phone, but it makes you notice things around it and it can point things out for you.

Lex Fridman (2:27:17.260)

So that is the main reason why I wanted to have a physical dimension.

Lex Fridman (2:27:22.380)

And it felt a little bit easier than that kind of a bit strange combination in the movie

Eugenia Kuyda (2:27:27.060)

Her when he has to show Samantha the world through the lens of his phone, but then at

Eugenia Kuyda (2:27:32.580)

the same time talk to her through the headphone.

Lex Fridman (2:27:35.100)

It just didn't seem as potentially immersive, so to say.

Lex Fridman (2:27:39.620)

So that's my main goal for Augmented Reality is like, how do we make your reality a little

Lex Fridman (2:27:43.860)

bit more magic?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:27:44.860)

There's been a lot of really nice robotics companies that all failed, mostly failed,

Lex Fridman (2:27:52.260)

home robotics, social robotics companies.

Lex Fridman (2:27:55.100)

What do you think replica will ever, is that a dream, longterm dream to have a physical

Lex Fridman (2:27:59.980)

form like, or is that not necessary?

Lex Fridman (2:28:03.380)

So you mentioned like with Augmented Reality bringing them into the world.

Lex Fridman (2:28:09.300)

What about like actual physical robot?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:28:13.180)

That I don't really believe in that much.

Lex Fridman (2:28:15.300)

I think it's a very niche product somehow.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:28:18.340)

I mean, if a robot could be indistinguishable from a human being, then maybe yes, but that

Lex Fridman (2:28:23.580)

of course, you know, we're not anywhere even to talk about it.

Lex Fridman (2:28:29.980)

But unless it's that, then having any physical representation really limits you a lot because

Eugenia Kuyda (2:28:35.140)

you probably will have to make it somewhat abstract because everything's changing so

Eugenia Kuyda (2:28:38.700)

fast.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:28:39.700)

Like, you know, we can update the 3D avatars every month and make them look better and

Eugenia Kuyda (2:28:43.980)

create more animations and make it more and more immersive.

Lex Fridman (2:28:48.380)

It's so much work in progress.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:28:50.720)

It's just showing what's possible right now with current tech, but it's not really in

Lex Fridman (2:28:54.780)

any way polished finished product, what we're doing.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:28:57.860)

The physical object, you kind of lock yourself into something for a long time.

Lex Fridman (2:29:02.380)

Anything's pretty niche.

Lex Fridman (2:29:03.660)

And again, so just doesn't, the capabilities are even less of, we're barely kind of like

Lex Fridman (2:29:09.300)

scratching the surface of what's possible with just software.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:29:12.900)

As soon as we introduce hardware, then, you know, we have even less capabilities.

Lex Fridman (2:29:17.220)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:29:18.220)

In terms of board members and investors and so on, the cost increases significantly.

Lex Fridman (2:29:23.580)

I mean, that's why you have to justify.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:29:26.980)

You have to be able to sell a thing for like $500 or something like that or more.

Lex Fridman (2:29:30.860)

And it's very difficult to provide that much value to people.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:29:34.200)

That's also true.

Lex Fridman (2:29:35.200)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:29:36.200)

And I guess that's super important.

Lex Fridman (2:29:37.200)

Most of our users don't have that much money.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:29:39.300)

We actually are probably more popular on Android and we have tons of users with really old

Lex Fridman (2:29:45.260)

Android phones.

Lex Fridman (2:29:47.500)

And most of our most active users live in small towns.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:29:51.140)

They're not necessarily making much and they just won't be able to afford any of that.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:29:56.260)

Ours is like the opposite of the early adopter of, you know, of a fancy technology product,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:30:01.580)

which really is interesting that like pretty much no VCs have yet have an AI friend, but

Eugenia Kuyda (2:30:09.180)

you know, but a guy who, you know, lives in Tennessee in a small town is already fully

Eugenia Kuyda (2:30:14.460)

in 2030 or in the world as we imagine in the movie Her, he's living that life already.

Lex Fridman (2:30:20.940)

What do you think?

Lex Fridman (2:30:21.940)

I have to ask you about the movie Her.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:30:24.460)

Let's do a movie review.

Lex Fridman (2:30:25.460)

What do you, what do you think they got?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:30:28.660)

They did a good job.

Lex Fridman (2:30:30.980)

What do you think they did a bad job of portraying about this experience of a voice based assistant

Lex Fridman (2:30:39.060)

that you can have a relationship with?

Lex Fridman (2:30:42.700)

First of all, I started working on this company before that movie came out.

Lex Fridman (2:30:46.300)

So it was a very, but once it came out, it was actually interesting that I was like,

Lex Fridman (2:30:50.540)

well, we're definitely working on the right thing.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:30:52.940)

We should continue.

Lex Fridman (2:30:53.940)

There are movies about it.

Lex Fridman (2:30:55.220)

And then, you know, X Machina came out and all these things.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:30:58.380)

In the movie Her I think that's the most important thing that people usually miss about the movie

Eugenia Kuyda (2:31:04.560)

is the ending.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:31:05.560)

Cause I think people check out when the AIs leave, but actually something really important

Eugenia Kuyda (2:31:10.900)

happens afterwards.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:31:11.900)

Cause the main character goes and talks to Samantha, his AI, and he says something like,

Lex Fridman (2:31:24.860)

you know, uh, how can you leave me?

Lex Fridman (2:31:26.620)

I've never loved anyone the way I loved you.

Lex Fridman (2:31:29.980)

And she goes, uh, well, me neither, but now we know how.

Lex Fridman (2:31:33.900)

And then the guy goes and writes a heartfelt letter to his ex wife, which he couldn't write

Eugenia Kuyda (2:31:38.820)

for, you know, the whole movie was struggling to actually write something meaningful to

Lex Fridman (2:31:43.420)

her, even though that's his job.

Lex Fridman (2:31:47.920)

And then he goes and, um, talk to his neighbor and they go to the rooftop and they cuddle.

Lex Fridman (2:31:53.500)

And it seems like something's starting there.

Lex Fridman (2:31:55.880)

And so I think this now we know how is the, is the main, main goal is the main meaning

Lex Fridman (2:32:01.480)

of that movie.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:32:02.480)

It's not about falling in love with the OS or running away from other people.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:32:06.720)

It's about learning what, you know, what it means to feel so deeply connected with something.

Lex Fridman (2:32:14.900)

What about the thing where the AI system was like actually hanging out with a lot of others?

Lex Fridman (2:32:21.460)

I felt jealous just like hearing that I was like, Oh, I mean, uh, yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:32:28.060)

So she was having, I forgot already, but she was having like deep meaningful discussion

Lex Fridman (2:32:32.500)

with some like philosopher guy.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:32:34.460)

Like Alan Watts or something.

Lex Fridman (2:32:35.460)

What kind of deep meaningful conversation can you have with Alan Watts in the first

Lex Fridman (2:32:41.300)

place?

Lex Fridman (2:32:42.300)

I know.

Lex Fridman (2:32:43.300)

But like, I would, I would feel so jealous that there's somebody who's like way more

Eugenia Kuyda (2:32:46.940)

intelligent than me and she's spending all her time with, I'd be like, well, why that

Eugenia Kuyda (2:32:52.620)

I won't be able to live up to that.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:32:55.500)

That's how thousands of them, uh, is that, um, is that a useful from the engineering

Lex Fridman (2:33:02.460)

perspective feature to have of jealousy?

Lex Fridman (2:33:06.580)

I don't know.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:33:07.580)

As you know,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:33:08.580)

we definitely played around with the replica universe where different replicas can talk

Eugenia Kuyda (2:33:11.780)

to each other.

Lex Fridman (2:33:12.780)

Universe.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:33:13.780)

Just kind of wouldn't, I think it will be something along these lines, but there was

Lex Fridman (2:33:19.340)

just no specific, uh, application straight away.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:33:23.860)

I think in the future, again, if I'm always thinking about it, if we had no tech limitations,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:33:28.700)

uh, right now, if we could build any conversations, any, um, possible features in this product,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:33:36.540)

then yeah, I think different replicas talking to each other would be also quite cool cause

Lex Fridman (2:33:40.220)

that would help us connect better.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:33:42.540)

You know, cause maybe mine could talk to yours and then give me some suggestions on what

Eugenia Kuyda (2:33:48.380)

I should say or not say, I'm just kidding, but like more, can it improve our connections

Lex Fridman (2:33:53.100)

and cause eventually I'm not quite yet sure that we will succeed, that our thinking is

Lex Fridman (2:34:01.300)

correct.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:34:02.300)

Um, cause there might be reality where having a perfect AI friend still makes us more disconnected

Eugenia Kuyda (2:34:09.500)

from each other and there's no way around it and does not improve any metrics for us.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:34:13.900)

Uh, real metrics, meaningful metrics.

Lex Fridman (2:34:15.900)

So success is, you know, we're happier and more connected.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:34:21.140)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:34:22.140)

I don't know.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:34:26.140)

Sure it's possible.

Lex Fridman (2:34:27.140)

There's a reality that's I I'm deeply optimistic.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:34:30.500)

I think, uh, are you worried, um, business wise, like how difficult it is to, um, to

Eugenia Kuyda (2:34:42.460)

bring this thing to life to where it's, I mean, there's a huge number of people that

Eugenia Kuyda (2:34:47.420)

use it already, but to, uh, yeah, like I said, in a multi billion dollar company, is that

Lex Fridman (2:34:52.420)

a source of stress for you?

Lex Fridman (2:34:54.340)

Are you a super optimistic and confident or do you?

Lex Fridman (2:35:00.300)

I don't, I'm not that much of a numbers person as you probably had seen it.

Lex Fridman (2:35:06.540)

So it doesn't matter for me whether like, whether we help 10,000 people or a million

Eugenia Kuyda (2:35:13.140)

people or a billion people with that, um, I, it would be great to scale it for more

Eugenia Kuyda (2:35:19.060)

people, but I'd say that even helping one, I think with this is such a magical, for me,

Lex Fridman (2:35:25.620)

it's absolute magic.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:35:26.620)

I never thought that, you know, would be able to build this, that anyone would ever, um,

Lex Fridman (2:35:32.380)

talk to it.

Lex Fridman (2:35:33.800)

And I always thought like, well, for me it would be successful if we managed to help

Lex Fridman (2:35:36.980)

and actually change a life for one person, like then we did something interesting and

Eugenia Kuyda (2:35:42.700)

you know, how many people can say they did it and specifically with this very futuristic,

Lex Fridman (2:35:47.300)

very romantic technology.

Lex Fridman (2:35:49.660)

So that's how I view it.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:35:51.940)

Uh, I think for me it's important to, to try to figure out how not, how to actually be,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:35:58.220)

you know, helpful.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:35:59.220)

Cause in the end of the day, if you can build a perfect AI friend, that's so understanding

Eugenia Kuyda (2:36:04.680)

that knows you better than any human out there can have great conversations with you, um,

Lex Fridman (2:36:10.660)

always knows how to make you feel better.

Lex Fridman (2:36:12.460)

Why would you choose another human?

Lex Fridman (2:36:14.940)

You know, so that's the question.

Lex Fridman (2:36:16.300)

How do you still keep building it?

Lex Fridman (2:36:17.780)

So it's optimizing for the right thing.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:36:19.620)

Uh, so it's still circling you back to other humans in a way.

Lex Fridman (2:36:24.340)

So I think that's the main, um, I think maybe that's the main kind of sort source of anxiety

Lex Fridman (2:36:30.900)

and just thinking about, uh, thinking about that can be a little bit stressful.

Lex Fridman (2:36:36.820)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:36:37.820)

That's a fascinating thing.

Lex Fridman (2:36:38.820)

How to have, um, how to have a friend that doesn't like sometimes like friends, quote

Eugenia Kuyda (2:36:45.780)

unquote, or like, you know, those people who have, when they, a guy in the guy universe,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:36:50.260)

when you have a girlfriend that, uh, you get the girlfriend and then the guy stops hanging

Eugenia Kuyda (2:36:56.340)

out with all of his friends, it's like, obviously the relationship with the girlfriend is fulfilling

Eugenia Kuyda (2:37:03.740)

or whatever, but like, you also want it to be where she like makes it more enriching

Eugenia Kuyda (2:37:10.300)

to hang out with the guy friends or whatever it was there anyway.

Lex Fridman (2:37:13.740)

But that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a fundamental problem in choosing the right

Eugenia Kuyda (2:37:18.740)

mate and probably the fundamental problem in creating the right AI system.

Lex Fridman (2:37:23.740)

Right.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:37:24.740)

What, uh, let me ask the sexy hot thing on the presses right now is GPT three got released

Lex Fridman (2:37:31.860)

with open AI.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:37:32.860)

It's a latest language model.

Lex Fridman (2:37:36.540)

They have kind of an API where you can create a lot of fun applications.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:37:40.140)

I think it's, as people have said, it's probably, uh, more hype than intelligence, but there's

Eugenia Kuyda (2:37:48.700)

a lot of really cool things, ideas there w w with increasing size, you can have better

Lex Fridman (2:37:56.220)

and better performance on language.

Lex Fridman (2:37:58.860)

What are your thoughts about the GPT three in connection to your work with the open domain

Eugenia Kuyda (2:38:04.140)

dialogue, but in general, like this learning in an unsupervised way from the internet to

Lex Fridman (2:38:12.700)

generate one character at a time, creating pretty cool text.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:38:18.500)

Uh, so we partner up before for the API launch.

Lex Fridman (2:38:23.420)

So we start working with them when, um, they decided to put together this API and we tried

Eugenia Kuyda (2:38:31.180)

it without fine tuning that we tried it with fine tuning on our data.

Lex Fridman (2:38:34.780)

And we've worked closely to actually optimize, uh, this model for, um, some of our data sets.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:38:45.900)

It's kind of cool.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:38:46.900)

Cause I think we're kind of, we're this polygon polygon for this kind of experimentation space

Eugenia Kuyda (2:38:51.800)

for experimental space for, for these models, uh, to see how they actually work with people.

Lex Fridman (2:38:56.940)

Cause there are no products publicly available to do that.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:38:59.540)

We're focused on open domain conversation so we can, you know, test how's Facebook blender

Lex Fridman (2:39:03.580)

doing or how's GPT three doing.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:39:06.020)

Uh, so with GPT three, we managed to improve by a few percentage points, like three or

Eugenia Kuyda (2:39:11.300)

four pretty meaningful amount of percentage points, our main metric, which is the ratio

Eugenia Kuyda (2:39:15.440)

of conversations that make people feel better.

Lex Fridman (2:39:19.280)

And every other metric across, across the field got a little boost.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:39:23.440)

Like now I'd say one out of five responses from replica comes, comes from GPT three.

Lex Fridman (2:39:30.860)

So our own blender mixes up like a bunch of candidates from different blender, you said,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:39:35.980)

well, yeah, just the model that looks at looks at top candidates from different models and

Lex Fridman (2:39:42.420)

picks the most, the best one.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:39:44.820)

Uh, so right now, one of five will come from GPT three is really great.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:39:50.220)

I mean, uh, what's the, do you have hope for, like, do you think there's a ceiling to this

Lex Fridman (2:39:57.420)

kind of approach?

Lex Fridman (2:39:58.780)

So we've had for a very long time we've used, um, it's in the very beginning, we, most,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:40:05.020)

it was, uh, most of replica was scripted and then a little bit of this fallback part of

Lex Fridman (2:40:09.720)

replica was using a retrieval model.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:40:12.260)

Um, and then those retrieval models started getting better and better and better, which

Lex Fridman (2:40:17.340)

transformers got a lot better and we're seeing great results.

Lex Fridman (2:40:20.780)

And then with GPT two, finally, generative models that originally were not very good

Lex Fridman (2:40:26.700)

and were the very, very fallback option for most of our conversations, but wouldn't even

Eugenia Kuyda (2:40:32.260)

put them in production.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:40:34.220)

Finally we could use some generative models as well along, um, you know, next to our retrieval

Eugenia Kuyda (2:40:39.420)

models.

Lex Fridman (2:40:40.580)

And then now we do GPT three, they're almost in par.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:40:44.220)

Um, so that's pretty exciting.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:40:46.260)

I think just seeing how from the very beginning of, um, you know, from 2015 where the first

Eugenia Kuyda (2:40:52.860)

model started to pop up here and there, like sequence to sequence, uh, the first papers

Eugenia Kuyda (2:40:57.900)

on that from my observer standpoint, personally, it's not, you know, it doesn't really, it's

Eugenia Kuyda (2:41:03.860)

not really building it, but it's only testing it on people basically in my, in my product

Eugenia Kuyda (2:41:08.140)

to see how all of a sudden we can use generative dialogue models in production and they're

Eugenia Kuyda (2:41:13.420)

better than others and they're better than scripted content.

Lex Fridman (2:41:17.180)

So we can't really get our scripted hard core content anymore to be as good as our end to

Eugenia Kuyda (2:41:23.100)

end models.

Lex Fridman (2:41:24.100)

That's exciting.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:41:25.100)

They're much better.

Lex Fridman (2:41:26.100)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:41:27.100)

To your question, whether that's the right way to go.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:41:30.260)

I'm again, I'm in the observer seat, I'm just, um, watching this very exciting movie.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:41:36.340)

Um, I mean, so far it's been stupid to bet against deep learning.

Lex Fridman (2:41:40.900)

So whether increasing the size, size, even more with a hundred trillion parameters will

Eugenia Kuyda (2:41:47.540)

finally get us to the right answer, whether that's the way or whether there should be,

Lex Fridman (2:41:53.420)

there has to be some other, again, I'm definitely not an expert in any way.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:41:58.860)

I think, and that's purely my instinct saying that there should be something else as well

Lex Fridman (2:42:02.980)

from memory.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:42:03.980)

No, for sure.

Lex Fridman (2:42:04.980)

But the question is, I wonder, I mean, yeah, then, then the argument is for reasoning or

Eugenia Kuyda (2:42:10.280)

for memory, it might emerge with more parameters, it might emerge larger.

Lex Fridman (2:42:14.740)

But might emerge.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:42:15.740)

You know, I would never think that to be honest, like maybe in 2017 where we've been just experimenting

Eugenia Kuyda (2:42:21.220)

with all, you know, with all the research that has been coming, that was coming out,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:42:25.900)

then I felt like there's like, we're hitting a wall that there should be something completely

Lex Fridman (2:42:30.740)

different, but then transforming models and then just bigger models.

Lex Fridman (2:42:34.140)

And then all of a sudden size matters.

Lex Fridman (2:42:36.380)

At that point, it felt like something dramatic needs to happen, but it didn't.

Lex Fridman (2:42:41.020)

And just the size, you know, gave us these results that to me are, you know, clear indication

Lex Fridman (2:42:48.100)

that we can solve this problem pretty soon.

Lex Fridman (2:42:50.380)

Did fine tuning help quite a bit?

Lex Fridman (2:42:52.700)

Oh yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:42:53.700)

Without it, it wasn't as good.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:42:56.420)

I mean, there is a compelling hope that you don't have to do fine tuning, which is one

Eugenia Kuyda (2:43:01.740)

of the cool things about GPT3, seems to do well without any fine tuning.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:43:06.460)

I guess for specific applications, we still want to train on a certain, like add a little

Eugenia Kuyda (2:43:11.740)

fine tune on like a specific use case, but it's an incredibly impressive thing from my

Lex Fridman (2:43:19.200)

standpoint.

Lex Fridman (2:43:20.200)

And again, I'm not an expert, so I wanted to say that there will be people then.

Lex Fridman (2:43:24.300)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:43:25.300)

I have access to the API.

Lex Fridman (2:43:26.300)

I've been, I'm going to probably do a bunch of fun things with it.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:43:30.660)

I already did some fun things, some videos coming up.

Lex Fridman (2:43:34.340)

Just the hell of it.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:43:35.340)

I mean, I could be a troll at this point with it.

Lex Fridman (2:43:37.140)

I haven't used it for a serious application, so it's really cool to see.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:43:41.060)

You're right.

Lex Fridman (2:43:43.140)

You're able to actually use it with real people and see how well it works.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:43:46.700)

That's really exciting.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:43:49.220)

Let me ask you another absurd question, but there's a feeling when you interact with Replica

Eugenia Kuyda (2:43:56.940)

with an AI system, there's an entity there.

Lex Fridman (2:44:01.860)

Do you think that entity has to be self aware?

Lex Fridman (2:44:06.340)

Do you think it has to have consciousness to create a rich experience and a corollary,

Lex Fridman (2:44:15.940)

what is consciousness?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:44:19.220)

I don't know if it does need to have any of those things, but again, because right now,

Lex Fridman (2:44:23.460)

you know, it doesn't have anything.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:44:24.460)

It can, again, a bunch of tricks they can simulate.

Lex Fridman (2:44:29.500)

I'm not sure.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:44:30.500)

Let's just put it this way, but I think as long as you can simulate it, if you can feel

Eugenia Kuyda (2:44:34.340)

like you're talking to a robot, to a machine that seems to be self aware, that seems to

Eugenia Kuyda (2:44:43.940)

reason well and feels like a person, and I think that's enough.

Lex Fridman (2:44:48.660)

And again, what's the goal?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:44:50.860)

In order to make people feel better, we might not even need that in the end of the day.

Lex Fridman (2:44:56.220)

What about, so that's one goal.

Lex Fridman (2:44:58.180)

What about like ethical things about suffering?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:45:02.220)

You know, the moment there's a display of consciousness, we associate consciousness

Lex Fridman (2:45:06.940)

with suffering, you know, there's a temptation to say, well, shouldn't this thing have rights?

Lex Fridman (2:45:16.260)

And this, shouldn't we not, you know, should we be careful about how we interact with a

Lex Fridman (2:45:25.300)

replica?

Lex Fridman (2:45:26.300)

Like, should it be illegal to torture a replica, right?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:45:31.540)

All those kinds of things.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:45:33.180)

Is that, see, I personally believe that that's going to be a thing, like that's a serious

Eugenia Kuyda (2:45:39.460)

thing to think about, but I'm not sure when.

Lex Fridman (2:45:43.340)

But by your smile, I can tell that's not a current concern.

Lex Fridman (2:45:48.740)

But do you think about that kind of stuff, about like, suffering and torture and ethical

Lex Fridman (2:45:55.160)

questions about AI systems?

Lex Fridman (2:45:57.900)

From their perspective?

Lex Fridman (2:45:58.900)

Well, I think if we're talking about long game, I wouldn't torture your AI.

Lex Fridman (2:46:03.680)

Who knows what happens in five to 10 years?

Lex Fridman (2:46:05.860)

Yeah, they'll get you off from that, they'll get you back eventually.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:46:08.180)

Try to be as nice as possible and create this ally.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:46:14.180)

I think there should be regulation both way, in a way, like, I don't think it's okay to

Eugenia Kuyda (2:46:19.460)

torture an AI, to be honest.

Lex Fridman (2:46:21.460)

I don't think it's okay to yell, Alexa, turn on the lights.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:46:24.700)

I think there should be some, or just saying kind of nasty, you know, like how kids learn

Eugenia Kuyda (2:46:28.820)

to interact with Alexa in this kind of mean way, because they just yell at it all the

Eugenia Kuyda (2:46:33.980)

time.

Lex Fridman (2:46:34.980)

I don't think that's great.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:46:35.980)

I think there should be some feedback loops so that these systems don't train us that

Lex Fridman (2:46:39.860)

it's okay to do that in general.

Lex Fridman (2:46:42.500)

So that if you try to do that, you really get some feedback from the system that it's

Lex Fridman (2:46:47.760)

not okay with that.

Lex Fridman (2:46:50.220)

And that's the most important right now.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:46:53.100)

Let me ask a question I think people are curious about when they look at a world class leader

Lex Fridman (2:47:01.500)

and thinker such as yourself, as what books, technical fiction, philosophical, had a big

Lex Fridman (2:47:08.140)

impact on your life?

Lex Fridman (2:47:09.940)

And maybe from another perspective, what books would you recommend others read?

Lex Fridman (2:47:15.480)

So my choice, the three books, right?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:47:17.180)

Three books.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:47:18.180)

My choice is, so the one book that really influenced me a lot when I was building, starting

Eugenia Kuyda (2:47:25.100)

out this company, maybe 10 years ago, was G.E.B. and I like everything about it, first

Lex Fridman (2:47:34.620)

of all.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:47:35.620)

It's just beautifully written and it's so old school and so somewhat outdated a little

Lex Fridman (2:47:42.100)

bit.

Lex Fridman (2:47:43.100)

But I think the ideas in it about the fact that a few meaningless components can come

Lex Fridman (2:47:48.740)

together and create meaning that we can't even understand.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:47:52.860)

This emerging thing, I mean complexity, the whole science of complexity and that beauty,

Lex Fridman (2:47:59.620)

intelligence, all interesting things about this world emerge.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:48:04.700)

Yeah and yeah, the Godel theorems and just thinking about like what even these formal

Lex Fridman (2:48:14.180)

systems, something can be created that we can't quite yet understand.

Lex Fridman (2:48:19.420)

And that from my romantic standpoint was always just, that is why it's important to, maybe

Lex Fridman (2:48:25.660)

I should try to work on these systems and try to build an AI.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:48:30.020)

Yes I'm not an engineer, yes I don't really know how it works, but I think that something

Lex Fridman (2:48:33.700)

comes out of it that's pure poetry and I know a little bit about that.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:48:40.020)

Something magical comes out of it that we can't quite put a finger on.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:48:45.620)

That's why that book was really fundamental for me, just for, I don't even know why, it

Eugenia Kuyda (2:48:51.460)

was just all about this little magic that happens.

Lex Fridman (2:48:55.620)

So that's one, probably the most important book for Replica was Carl Rogers on becoming

Eugenia Kuyda (2:49:00.420)

a person.

Lex Fridman (2:49:02.460)

And that's really, and so I think when I think about our company, it's all about there's

Lex Fridman (2:49:07.340)

so many little magical things that happened over the course of working on it.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:49:14.140)

For instance, I mean the most famous chatbot that we learned about when we started working

Eugenia Kuyda (2:49:18.220)

on the company was Eliza, which was Weisenbaum, the MIT professor that built a chatbot that

Lex Fridman (2:49:24.900)

would listen to you and be a therapist.

Lex Fridman (2:49:29.660)

And I got really inspired to build Replica when I read Carl Rogers on becoming a person.

Lex Fridman (2:49:34.320)

And then I realized that Eliza was mocking Carl Rogers.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:49:37.740)

It was Carl Rogers back in the day.

Lex Fridman (2:49:39.940)

But I thought that Carl Rogers ideas are, they're simple and they're not, they're very

Eugenia Kuyda (2:49:45.940)

simple, but they're maybe the most profound thing I've ever learned about human beings.

Lex Fridman (2:49:52.740)

And that's the fact that before Carl Rogers, most therapy was about seeing what's wrong

Eugenia Kuyda (2:49:58.100)

with people and trying to fix it or show them what's wrong with you.

Lex Fridman (2:50:01.700)

And it was all built on the fact that most people are, all people are fundamentally flawed.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:50:07.340)

We have this broken psyche and therapy is just an instrument to shed some light on that.

Lex Fridman (2:50:15.140)

And Carl Rogers was different in a way that he finally said that, well, it's very important

Eugenia Kuyda (2:50:21.180)

for therapy to work is to create this therapeutic relationship where you believe fundamentally

Lex Fridman (2:50:25.940)

and inclination to positive growth that everyone deep inside wants to grow positively and change.

Lex Fridman (2:50:33.340)

And it's super important to create this space and this therapeutic relationship where you

Eugenia Kuyda (2:50:36.540)

give unconditional positive regard, deep understanding, allowing someone else to be a separate person,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:50:42.220)

full acceptance.

Lex Fridman (2:50:44.420)

And you also try to be as genuine as possible in it.

Lex Fridman (2:50:48.100)

And then for him, that was his own journey of personal growth.

Lex Fridman (2:50:54.060)

And that was back in the sixties.

Lex Fridman (2:50:55.740)

And even that book that is coming from years ago, there's a mention that even machines

Lex Fridman (2:51:02.260)

can potentially do that.

Lex Fridman (2:51:05.380)

And I always felt that, you know, creating the space is probably the most, the biggest

Lex Fridman (2:51:09.380)

gift we can give to each other.

Lex Fridman (2:51:10.860)

And that's why the book was fundamental for me personally, because I felt I want to be

Lex Fridman (2:51:15.340)

learning how to do that in my life.

Lex Fridman (2:51:18.220)

And maybe I can scale it with, you know, with these AI systems and other people can get

Lex Fridman (2:51:22.340)

access to that.

Lex Fridman (2:51:23.340)

So I think Carl Rogers, it's a pretty dry and a bit boring book, but I think the idea

Lex Fridman (2:51:28.620)

is good.

Lex Fridman (2:51:29.620)

Would you recommend others try to read it?

Lex Fridman (2:51:30.620)

I do.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:51:31.620)

I think for, just for yourself, for as a human, not as an AI, as a human, it's, it is, it

Eugenia Kuyda (2:51:38.980)

is just, and for him, that was his own path of his own personal, of growing personally

Eugenia Kuyda (2:51:44.860)

over years, working with people like that.

Lex Fridman (2:51:47.860)

And so it was work and himself growing, helping other people grow and growing through that.

Lex Fridman (2:51:52.100)

And that's fundamentally what I believe in with our work, helping other people grow,

Lex Fridman (2:51:56.900)

and ourselves, ourselves, trying to build a company that's all built on those principles,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:52:03.420)

you know, having a good time, allowing some people who work with to grow a little bit.

Lex Fridman (2:52:07.780)

So these two books, and then I would throw in, what we have on our, in our, in our office,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:52:15.000)

when we started a company in Russia, we put a neon sign in our office because we thought

Lex Fridman (2:52:19.840)

that's the recipe for success.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:52:22.220)

If we do that, we're definitely going to wake up as a multi billion dollar company.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:52:26.540)

It was the Ludwig Wittgenstein quote, the limits of my language are the limits of my

Eugenia Kuyda (2:52:31.380)

world.

Lex Fridman (2:52:32.380)

What's the quote?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:52:33.380)

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

Lex Fridman (2:52:37.180)

And I love the Tractatus.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:52:39.020)

I think it's just, it's just a beautiful, it's a book by Wittgenstein.

Lex Fridman (2:52:43.020)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:52:44.020)

And I would recommend that too, even although he himself didn't believe in that by the end

Lex Fridman (2:52:48.340)

of his lifetime and debunked these ideas.

Lex Fridman (2:52:51.420)

But I think I remember once an engineer came in 2012, I think with 13, a friend of ours

Eugenia Kuyda (2:52:58.820)

who worked with us and then went on to work at DeepMind and he gave, talked to us about

Eugenia Kuyda (2:53:03.460)

word2vec.

Lex Fridman (2:53:04.940)

And I saw that I'm like, wow, that's, you know, they, they wanted to translate language

Eugenia Kuyda (2:53:10.340)

into, you know, some other representation.

Lex Fridman (2:53:13.260)

And that seems like some, you know, somehow all of that at some point, I think we'll come

Eugenia Kuyda (2:53:18.860)

into this one, to this one place.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:53:22.620)

Somehow it just all feels like different people think about similar ideas in different times

Eugenia Kuyda (2:53:26.780)

from absolutely different perspectives.

Lex Fridman (2:53:29.780)

And that's why I like these books.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:53:31.020)

In the midst of our language is the limit of our world.

Lex Fridman (2:53:34.780)

And we still have that neon sign, it's very hard to work with this red light in your face.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:53:45.180)

I mean, on the, on the Russian side of things, in terms of language, the limits of language

Eugenia Kuyda (2:53:53.340)

being the limit of our world, you know, Russian is a beautiful language in some sense.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:53:57.300)

There's wit, there's humor, there's pain.

Lex Fridman (2:54:00.260)

There's so much.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:54:01.260)

We don't have time to talk about it much today, but I'm going to Paris to talk to Dostoyevsky

Lex Fridman (2:54:06.820)

Tolstoy translators.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:54:09.340)

I think it's this fascinating art, like art and engineering, that means such an interesting

Lex Fridman (2:54:15.660)

process.

Lex Fridman (2:54:16.660)

But so from the replica perspective, do you, what do you think about translation?

Lex Fridman (2:54:23.740)

How difficult it is to create a deep, meaningful connection in Russian versus English?

Lex Fridman (2:54:29.500)

How you can translate the two languages?

Lex Fridman (2:54:32.300)

You speak both?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:54:33.300)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:54:34.300)

I think we're two different people in different languages.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:54:37.020)

Even I'm, you know, thinking about, there's actually some research on that.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:54:41.100)

I looked into that at some point because I was fascinated by the fact that what I'm talking

Eugenia Kuyda (2:54:45.020)

about with, what I was talking about with my Russian therapist has nothing to do with

Lex Fridman (2:54:48.380)

what I'm talking about with my English speaking therapist.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:54:51.820)

It's two different lives, two different types of conversations, two different personas.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:54:59.840)

The main difference between the languages are, with Russian and English is that Russian,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:55:05.380)

well English is like a piano.

Lex Fridman (2:55:06.820)

It's a limited number of a lot of different keys, but not too many.

Lex Fridman (2:55:11.420)

And Russian is like an organ or something.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:55:13.700)

It's just something gigantic with so many different keys and so many different opportunities

Eugenia Kuyda (2:55:18.220)

to screw up and so many opportunities to do something completely tone deaf.

Lex Fridman (2:55:24.500)

It is just a much harder language to use.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:55:28.220)

It has way too much flexibility and way too many tones.

Lex Fridman (2:55:34.180)

What about the entirety of like World War II, communism, Stalin, the pain of the people

Eugenia Kuyda (2:55:40.700)

like having been deceived by the dream, like all the pain of like just the entirety of

Lex Fridman (2:55:47.860)

it.

Lex Fridman (2:55:48.860)

Is that in the language too?

Lex Fridman (2:55:49.860)

Does that have to do?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:55:50.860)

Oh, for sure.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:55:51.860)

I mean, we have words that don't have direct translation that to English that are very

Eugenia Kuyda (2:55:56.340)

much like we have, which is sort of like to hold a grudge or something, but it doesn't

Lex Fridman (2:56:03.460)

have, it doesn't, you don't need to have anyone to do it to you.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:56:07.780)

It's just your state.

Lex Fridman (2:56:08.780)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:56:09.780)

You just feel like that.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:56:10.780)

You feel like betrayed by other people basically, but it's not that and you can't really translate

Eugenia Kuyda (2:56:15.140)

that.

Lex Fridman (2:56:16.140)

And I think that's super important.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:56:18.100)

There are very many words that are very specific, explain the Russian being, and I think it

Eugenia Kuyda (2:56:24.020)

can only come from a nation that suffered so much and saw institutions fall time after

Eugenia Kuyda (2:56:31.220)

time after time and you know, what's exciting, maybe not exciting, exciting the wrong word,

Lex Fridman (2:56:36.420)

but what's interesting about like my generation, my mom's generation, my parents generation,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:56:42.700)

that we saw institutions fall two or three times in our lifetime and most Americans have

Eugenia Kuyda (2:56:48.420)

never seen them fall and they just think that they exist forever, which is really interesting,

Lex Fridman (2:56:55.260)

but it's definitely a country that suffered so much and it makes, unfortunately when I

Eugenia Kuyda (2:57:01.300)

go back and I, you know, hang out with my Russian friends, it makes people very cynical.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:57:06.580)

They stop believing in the future.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:57:10.140)

I hope that's not going to be the case for so long or something's going to change again,

Lex Fridman (2:57:15.380)

but I think seeing institutions fall is a very traumatic experience.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:57:19.980)

That's very interesting and what's on 2020 is a very interesting, do you think a civilization

Lex Fridman (2:57:28.220)

will collapse?

Lex Fridman (2:57:29.220)

See, I'm a very practical person.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:57:33.580)

We're speaking in English.

Lex Fridman (2:57:34.580)

So like you said, you're a different person in English and Russian.

Lex Fridman (2:57:37.420)

So in Russian you might answer that differently, but in English, yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:57:42.140)

I'm an optimist and I generally believe that there is all, you know, even although the

Eugenia Kuyda (2:57:49.180)

perspectives are grim, there's always a place for a miracle.

Lex Fridman (2:57:54.820)

I mean, it's always been like that with my life.

Lex Fridman (2:57:56.940)

So yeah, my life has been, I've been incredibly lucky and things just, miracles happen all

Lex Fridman (2:58:02.740)

the time with this company, with people I know, with everything around me.

Lex Fridman (2:58:08.100)

And so I didn't mention that book, but maybe In Search of Miraculous or In Search for Miraculous

Eugenia Kuyda (2:58:13.620)

or whatever the English translation for that is, good Russian book for everyone to read.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:58:19.540)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:58:20.540)

I mean, if you put good vibes, if you put love out there in the world, miracles somehow

Eugenia Kuyda (2:58:29.740)

happen.

Lex Fridman (2:58:30.740)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:58:31.740)

I believe that too, or at least I believe that, I don't know.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:58:35.860)

Let me ask the most absurd, final, ridiculous question of, we've talked about life a lot.

Lex Fridman (2:58:42.380)

What do you think is the meaning of it all?

Lex Fridman (2:58:45.380)

What's the meaning of life?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:58:46.860)

I mean, my answer is probably going to be pretty cheesy.

Lex Fridman (2:58:52.700)

But I think the state of love is once you feel it, in a way that we've discussed it

Eugenia Kuyda (2:58:59.580)

before.

Lex Fridman (2:59:00.580)

I'm not talking about falling in love, where...

Eugenia Kuyda (2:59:04.860)

Just love.

Lex Fridman (2:59:05.860)

To yourself, to other people, to something, to the world.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:59:10.740)

That state of bliss that we experience sometimes, whether through connection with ourselves,

Eugenia Kuyda (2:59:16.340)

with our people, with the technology, there's something special about those moments.

Lex Fridman (2:59:23.620)

So I would say, if anything, that's the only...

Lex Fridman (2:59:30.500)

If it's not for that, then for what else are we really trying to do that?

Eugenia Kuyda (2:59:35.620)

I don't think there's a better way to end it than talking about love.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:59:38.820)

Eugenia, I told you offline that there's something about me that felt like this...

Eugenia Kuyda (2:59:47.780)

Talking to you, meeting you in person would be a turning point for my life.

Lex Fridman (2:59:51.700)

I know that might sound weird to hear, but it was a huge honor to talk to you.

Eugenia Kuyda (2:59:59.500)

I hope we talk again.

Lex Fridman (30:00.680)

the university.

Lex Fridman (30:01.740)

And then he'll just tell me, try to teach me, you know, something about planets and

Lex Fridman (30:07.960)

whatever the particles and stuff.

Eugenia Kuyda (30:10.240)

And, you know, I'm not smart at all, so I could never understand anything, but I was

Lex Fridman (30:14.340)

interested as a journalist kind of type interested.

Lex Fridman (30:18.000)

But that was my memory.

Eugenia Kuyda (30:19.000)

And, you know, I'm happy that I wasn't, I somehow got spared that I was probably too

Eugenia Kuyda (30:25.200)

young to remember any of the traumatic stuff.

Lex Fridman (30:27.400)

So the only thing I really remember had this bootleg that was very traumatic, had this

Eugenia Kuyda (30:31.860)

bootleg Nintendo, which was called Dandy in Russia.

Lex Fridman (30:35.760)

So in 1993, there was nothing to eat, like, even if you had any money, you would go to

Eugenia Kuyda (30:39.280)

the store and there was no food.

Lex Fridman (30:40.800)

I don't know if you remember that.

Lex Fridman (30:42.880)

And our friend had a restaurant, like a government, half government owned something restaurant.

Lex Fridman (30:49.960)

So they always had supplies.

Lex Fridman (30:51.960)

So he exchanged a big bag of wheat for this Nintendo, the bootleg Nintendo, that I remember

Lex Fridman (31:00.080)

very fondly, cause I think I was nine or something like that and we're seven.

Eugenia Kuyda (31:05.560)

Like we just got it and I was playing it and there was this, you know, Dandy TV show.

Lex Fridman (31:11.480)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (31:12.480)

So traumatic in a positive sense, you mean like, like a definitive, well, they took it

Lex Fridman (31:17.080)

away and gave me a bag of wheat instead.

Lex Fridman (31:19.440)

And I cried like my eyes out for days and days and days.

Lex Fridman (31:23.720)

Oh no.

Lex Fridman (31:24.720)

And then, you know, as a, and my dad said, we're going to like exchange it back in a

Lex Fridman (31:28.680)

little bit.

Lex Fridman (31:29.680)

So you keep the little gun, you know, the one that you shoot the ducks with.

Lex Fridman (31:32.880)

So I'm like, okay, I'm keeping the gun.

Lex Fridman (31:34.240)

So sometime it's going to come back, but then they exchanged the gun as well for some sugar

Lex Fridman (31:38.880)

or something.

Eugenia Kuyda (31:39.880)

I was so pissed.

Lex Fridman (31:41.520)

I was like, I didn't want to eat for days after that.

Eugenia Kuyda (31:43.840)

I'm like, I don't want your food.

Lex Fridman (31:44.840)

Give me my Nintendo back.

Eugenia Kuyda (31:47.640)

That was extremely traumatic.

Lex Fridman (31:50.120)

But you know, I was happy that that was my only traumatic experience.

Eugenia Kuyda (31:53.640)

You know, my dad had to actually go to Chernobyl with a bunch of 20 year olds.

Lex Fridman (31:57.640)

He was 20 when he went to Chernobyl and that was right after the explosion.

Eugenia Kuyda (32:01.760)

No one knew anything.

Lex Fridman (32:03.440)

The whole crew he went with, all of them are dead now.

Eugenia Kuyda (32:05.800)

I think there was this one guy still, that was still alive for this last few years.

Lex Fridman (32:11.760)

I think he died a few years ago now.

Eugenia Kuyda (32:13.920)

My dad somehow luckily got back earlier than everyone else, but just the fact that that

Lex Fridman (32:19.360)

was the, and I was always like, well, how did they send you?

Eugenia Kuyda (32:21.960)

I was only, I was just born, you know, you had a newborn talk about paternity leave.

Eugenia Kuyda (32:26.280)

They were like, but that's who they took because they didn't know whether you would be able

Eugenia Kuyda (32:29.800)

to have kids when you come back.

Lex Fridman (32:31.120)

So they took the ones with kids.

Lex Fridman (32:33.880)

So him with some guys went to, and I'm just thinking of me when I was 20, I was so sheltered

Lex Fridman (32:40.360)

from any problems whatsoever in life.

Lex Fridman (32:42.200)

And then my dad, his 21st birthday at the reactor, you like work three hours a day,

Eugenia Kuyda (32:51.200)

you sleep the rest and, and I, yeah, so I played with a lot of toys from Chernobyl.

Lex Fridman (32:57.040)

What are your memories of Chernobyl in general, like the bigger context, you know, because

Eugenia Kuyda (33:02.640)

of that HBO show it's the world's attention turned to it once again, like, what are your

Lex Fridman (33:09.240)

thoughts about Chernobyl?

Lex Fridman (33:10.840)

Did Russia screw that one up?

Eugenia Kuyda (33:13.000)

Like, you know, there's probably a lot of lessons about our modern times with data about

Lex Fridman (33:18.760)

coronavirus and all that kind of stuff.

Eugenia Kuyda (33:20.520)

It seems like there's a lot of misinformation.

Eugenia Kuyda (33:22.960)

There's a lot of people kind of trying to hide whether they screwed something up or

Eugenia Kuyda (33:29.720)

not, as it's very understandable, it's very human, very wrong, probably, but obviously

Lex Fridman (33:35.580)

Russia was probably trying to hide that they screwed things up.

Lex Fridman (33:40.320)

Like, what are your thoughts about that time, personal and general?

Lex Fridman (33:45.520)

I mean, I was born when the explosion happened.

Lex Fridman (33:50.200)

So actually a few months after, so of course I don't remember anything apart from the fact

Eugenia Kuyda (33:55.120)

that my dad would bring me tiny toys, like plastic things that would just go crazy haywire

Eugenia Kuyda (34:02.040)

when you, you know, put the Geiger thing to it.

Lex Fridman (34:06.360)

My mom was like, just nuclear about that.

Eugenia Kuyda (34:09.240)

She was like, what are you bringing, you should not do that.

Lex Fridman (34:13.440)

She was nuclear.

Eugenia Kuyda (34:14.440)

Very nice.

Lex Fridman (34:15.440)

Well done.

Eugenia Kuyda (34:16.440)

I'm sorry.

Lex Fridman (34:17.440)

It was, but yeah, but the TV show was just phenomenal.

Lex Fridman (34:21.200)

The HBO one?

Eugenia Kuyda (34:22.760)

Yeah, it was definitely, first of all, it's incredible how that was made not by the Russians,

Lex Fridman (34:28.960)

but someone else, but capturing so well everything about our country.

Eugenia Kuyda (34:37.360)

It felt a lot more genuine than most of the movies and TV shows that are made now in Russia,

Eugenia Kuyda (34:41.160)

just so much more genuine.

Lex Fridman (34:43.320)

And most of my friends in Russia were just in complete awe about the show, but I think

Eugenia Kuyda (34:47.800)

that...

Lex Fridman (34:48.800)

How good of a job they did.

Eugenia Kuyda (34:49.800)

Oh my God, phenomenal.

Lex Fridman (34:50.800)

But also...

Eugenia Kuyda (34:51.800)

The apartments, there's something, yeah.

Lex Fridman (34:52.800)

The set design.

Eugenia Kuyda (34:53.800)

I mean, Russians can't do that, you know, but you see everything and it's like, wow,

Lex Fridman (34:58.240)

that's exactly how it was.

Lex Fridman (35:00.240)

So I don't know, that show, I don't know what to think about that because it's British accents,

Lex Fridman (35:06.840)

British actors of a person, I forgot who created the show.

Lex Fridman (35:12.560)

But I remember reading about him and he's not, he doesn't even feel like, like there's

Lex Fridman (35:17.480)

no Russia in this history.

Eugenia Kuyda (35:19.040)

No, he did like super bad or something like that.

Lex Fridman (35:21.400)

Or like, I don't know.

Eugenia Kuyda (35:22.400)

Yeah, like exactly.

Eugenia Kuyda (35:23.400)

Whatever that thing about the bachelor party in Vegas, number four and five or something

Eugenia Kuyda (35:28.580)

were the ones that he worked with.

Lex Fridman (35:30.080)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (35:31.080)

But so he made me feel really sad for some reason that if a person, obviously a genius,

Eugenia Kuyda (35:38.600)

could go in and just study and just be extreme attention to detail, they can do a good job.

Lex Fridman (35:46.000)

It made me think like, why don't other people do a good job with this?

Lex Fridman (35:52.520)

Like about Russia, like there's so little about Russia.

Eugenia Kuyda (35:56.320)

There's so few good films about the Russian side of World War II.

Eugenia Kuyda (36:02.600)

I mean, there's so much interesting evil and not, and beautiful moments in the history

Eugenia Kuyda (36:10.560)

of the 20th century in Russia that it feels like there's not many good films on from the

Lex Fridman (36:16.640)

Russians.

Eugenia Kuyda (36:17.640)

You would expect something from the Russians.

Lex Fridman (36:18.640)

Well, they keep making these propaganda movies now.

Eugenia Kuyda (36:21.640)

Oh no.

Lex Fridman (36:22.640)

Unfortunately.

Lex Fridman (36:23.640)

But yeah, no, Chernobyl was such a perfect TV show.

Eugenia Kuyda (36:26.560)

I think capturing really well, it's not about like even the set design, which was phenomenal,

Lex Fridman (36:30.720)

but just capturing all the problems that exist now with the country and like focusing on

Lex Fridman (36:37.120)

the right things.

Eugenia Kuyda (36:38.120)

Like if you build the whole country on a lie, that's what's going to happen.

Lex Fridman (36:41.960)

And that's just this very simple kind of thing.

Eugenia Kuyda (36:47.120)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (36:48.960)

And did you have your dad talked about it to you, like his thoughts on the experience?

Eugenia Kuyda (36:55.760)

He never talks.

Eugenia Kuyda (36:56.760)

He's this kind of Russian man that just, my husband who's American and he asked him a

Lex Fridman (37:02.240)

few times like, you know, Igor, how did you, but why did you say yes?

Lex Fridman (37:06.560)

Or like, why did you decide to go?

Eugenia Kuyda (37:08.420)

You could have said no, not go to Chernobyl.

Lex Fridman (37:10.200)

Why would like a person like, that's what you do.

Eugenia Kuyda (37:14.880)

You cannot say no.

Lex Fridman (37:15.880)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (37:16.880)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (37:17.880)

It's just, it's like a Russian way.

Eugenia Kuyda (37:21.560)

It's the Russian way.

Lex Fridman (37:22.560)

Men don't talk that much.

Eugenia Kuyda (37:23.560)

Nope.

Lex Fridman (37:24.560)

There's no one upsides for that.

Eugenia Kuyda (37:27.080)

Yeah, that's the truth.

Lex Fridman (37:29.400)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (37:30.400)

So back to post Putin Russia, or maybe we skipped a few steps along the way, but you

Lex Fridman (37:37.320)

were trying to do, to be a journalist in that time.

Lex Fridman (37:43.560)

What was, what was Russia like at that time?

Lex Fridman (37:46.640)

Post you said 2007 Starbucks type of thing.

Lex Fridman (37:51.860)

What else, what else was Russia like then?

Lex Fridman (37:55.560)

I think there was just hope.

Eugenia Kuyda (37:56.720)

There was this big hope that we're going to be, you know, friends with the United States

Lex Fridman (38:01.840)

and we're going to be friends with Europe and we're just going to be also a country

Eugenia Kuyda (38:06.600)

like those with, you know, bike lanes and parks and everything's going to be urbanized.

Lex Fridman (38:12.720)

And again, we're talking about nineties where like people would be shot in the street.

Lex Fridman (38:16.920)

And it was, I still have a fond memory of going into a movie theater and, you know,

Lex Fridman (38:21.800)

coming out of it after the movie.

Lex Fridman (38:22.980)

And the guy that I saw on the stairs was like neither shot, which was, again, it was like

Lex Fridman (38:28.100)

a thing in the nineties that would be happening.

Eugenia Kuyda (38:30.280)

People were, you know, people were getting shot here and there, tons of violence, tons

Lex Fridman (38:35.400)

of you know, just basically mafia mobs on in the streets.

Lex Fridman (38:40.040)

And then the two thousands were like, you know, things just got cleaned up, oil went

Eugenia Kuyda (38:44.560)

up and the country started getting a little bit richer, you know, the nineties were so

Eugenia Kuyda (38:50.700)

grim mostly because the economy was in shambles and oil prices were not high.

Lex Fridman (38:54.960)

So the country didn't have anything.

Eugenia Kuyda (38:56.740)

We defaulted in 1998 and the money kept jumping back and forth.

Eugenia Kuyda (39:01.680)

Like first there were millions of rubbles, then it got like default, you know, then it

Eugenia Kuyda (39:05.640)

got to like thousands.

Eugenia Kuyda (39:06.640)

Then it was one rubble was something then again to millions, there's like crazy town.

Eugenia Kuyda (39:11.800)

That was crazy.

Lex Fridman (39:12.960)

And then the two thousands were just these years of stability in a way and the country

Eugenia Kuyda (39:19.480)

getting a little bit richer because of, you know, again, oil and gas.

Lex Fridman (39:22.680)

And we were starting to, we started to look at specifically in Moscow and St. Petersburg

Eugenia Kuyda (39:27.040)

to look at other cities in Europe and New York and US and trying to do the same in our

Lex Fridman (39:34.600)

like small kind of cities, towns there.

Lex Fridman (39:38.000)

What was, what were your thoughts of Putin at the time?

Lex Fridman (39:40.320)

Well, in the beginning he was really positive.

Eugenia Kuyda (39:43.480)

Everyone was very, you know, positive about Putin.

Lex Fridman (39:46.000)

He was young.

Eugenia Kuyda (39:47.000)

Um, it's very energetic.

Eugenia Kuyda (39:49.560)

He also immediate the shirtless somewhat compared to, well, that was not like way before the

Eugenia Kuyda (39:55.960)

shirtless era.

Lex Fridman (39:56.960)

Um, the shirtless era.

Eugenia Kuyda (39:57.960)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (39:58.960)

So he didn't start out shirtless.

Eugenia Kuyda (39:59.960)

When did the shirtless era, it's like the propaganda of riding horse, fishing, 2010,

Lex Fridman (3:00:01.100)

Thank you so much for your time.

Eugenia Kuyda (3:00:02.100)

Thank you so much, Lex.

Eugenia Kuyda (3:00:05.020)

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eugenia Cuida, and thank you to our sponsors,

Eugenia Kuyda (3:00:09.780)

DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App.

Eugenia Kuyda (3:00:13.460)

Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

Eugenia Kuyda (3:00:18.180)

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, follow

Lex Fridman (3:00:23.140)

on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

Lex Fridman (3:00:28.600)

And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan.

Eugenia Kuyda (3:00:32.300)

The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth that there's no reason to

Eugenia Kuyda (3:00:36.740)

deceive ourselves with pretty stories of which there's little good evidence.

Eugenia Kuyda (3:00:41.460)

Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability is to look death in the eye and to be grateful

Eugenia Kuyda (3:00:48.080)

every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

Lex Fridman (3:00:54.700)

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Eugenia Kuyda (40:05.720)

11, 12.

Lex Fridman (40:06.720)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (40:07.720)

That's my favorite.

Eugenia Kuyda (40:08.720)

You know, like people talk about the favorite Beatles, like the, that's my favorite Putin

Eugenia Kuyda (40:14.760)

is the shirtless Putin.

Eugenia Kuyda (40:15.760)

Now I remember very, very clearly 1996 where, you know, Americans really helped Russia with

Eugenia Kuyda (40:20.960)

elections and Yeltsin got reelected, um, thankfully so, uh, because there's a huge threat that

Lex Fridman (40:27.560)

actually the communists will get back to power.

Eugenia Kuyda (40:29.680)

Uh, they were a lot more popular.

Lex Fridman (40:32.680)

And then a lot of American experts, political experts, uh, and campaign experts descended

Eugenia Kuyda (40:39.660)

on Moscow and helped Yeltsin actually get, get the presidency, the second term for the

Lex Fridman (40:44.360)

pro, um, the, of the presidency.

Lex Fridman (40:46.340)

But Yeltsin was not feeling great, you know, in the, by the end of his second term, uh,

Lex Fridman (40:52.240)

he was, you know, alcoholic.

Eugenia Kuyda (40:53.920)

He was really old.

Lex Fridman (40:54.920)

He was falling off, uh, you know, the stages when he, where he was talking.

Eugenia Kuyda (40:59.960)

Uh, so people were looking for fresh, I think for a fresh face, for someone who's going

Eugenia Kuyda (41:04.560)

to continue Yeltsin's, uh, work, but who's going to be a lot more energetic and a lot

Eugenia Kuyda (41:09.680)

more active, young, um, efficient, maybe.

Lex Fridman (41:15.480)

So that w that's what we all saw in Putin back in the day.

Eugenia Kuyda (41:17.880)

I, I'd say that everyone, absolutely everyone in Russia in early two thousands who was not

Lex Fridman (41:22.360)

a communist would be, yeah, Putin's great.

Eugenia Kuyda (41:25.360)

We have a lot of hopes for him.

Lex Fridman (41:26.960)

What are your thoughts?

Lex Fridman (41:27.960)

And I promise we'll get back to, uh, first of all, your love story.

Lex Fridman (41:34.240)

Second of all, AI, well, what are your thoughts about, um, communism?

Eugenia Kuyda (41:40.200)

The 20th century, I apologize.

Lex Fridman (41:42.680)

I'm reading the rise and fall of the third Reich.

Eugenia Kuyda (41:46.240)

Oh my God.

Lex Fridman (41:48.580)

So I'm like really steeped into like world war II and Stalin and Hitler and just these

Eugenia Kuyda (41:56.660)

dramatic personalities that brought so much evil to the world.

Lex Fridman (42:00.840)

But it's also interesting to politically think about these different systems and what they've

Eugenia Kuyda (42:06.580)

led to.

Lex Fridman (42:08.320)

And Russia is one of the sort of beacons of communism in the 20th century.

Lex Fridman (42:16.280)

What are your thoughts about communism?

Lex Fridman (42:17.840)

Having experienced it as a political system?

Eugenia Kuyda (42:20.480)

I mean, I have only experienced it a little bit, but mostly through stories and through,

Eugenia Kuyda (42:24.360)

you know, seeing my parents and my grandparents who lived through that, I mean, it was horrible.

Eugenia Kuyda (42:29.320)

It was just plain horrible.

Lex Fridman (42:31.120)

It was just awful.

Eugenia Kuyda (42:33.360)

You think it's, there's something, I mean, it sounds nice on paper.

Eugenia Kuyda (42:40.960)

There's a, so like the drawbacks of capitalism is that, uh, you know, eventually there is,

Eugenia Kuyda (42:47.840)

it's a, it's the point of like a slippery slope.

Eugenia Kuyda (42:51.160)

Eventually it creates, uh, you know, the rich get richer, it creates a disparity, like inequality

Eugenia Kuyda (42:59.040)

of, um, wealth inequality.

Eugenia Kuyda (43:02.520)

If like, you know, I guess it's hypothetical at this point, but eventually capitalism leads

Eugenia Kuyda (43:09.080)

to humongous inequality and that that's, you know, some people argue that that's a source

Lex Fridman (43:13.720)

of unhappiness is it's not like absolute wealth of people.

Eugenia Kuyda (43:17.720)

It's the fact that there's a lot of people much richer than you.

Lex Fridman (43:21.240)

There's a feeling of like, that's where unhappiness can come from.

Lex Fridman (43:25.300)

So the idea of, of communism or these sort of Marxism is, uh, is, is not allowing that

Eugenia Kuyda (43:32.960)

kind of slippery slope, but then you see the actual implementations of it and stuff seems

Eugenia Kuyda (43:37.800)

to be, seems to go wrong very badly.

Lex Fridman (43:42.400)

What do you think that is?

Lex Fridman (43:43.880)

Why does it go wrong?

Lex Fridman (43:46.680)

What is it about human nature?

Eugenia Kuyda (43:47.680)

If we look at Chernobyl, you know, those kinds of bureaucracies that were constructed.

Lex Fridman (43:54.740)

Is there something like, do you think about this much of like why it goes wrong?

Eugenia Kuyda (44:00.280)

Well, there's no one was really like, it's not that everyone was equal.

Eugenia Kuyda (44:05.320)

Obviously the, you know, the, the government and everyone close to that were the bosses.

Lex Fridman (44:12.160)

So it's not like fully, I guess, uh, this dream of equal life.

Lex Fridman (44:17.740)

So then I guess the, the situation that we had in, you know, the Russia had in the Soviet

Eugenia Kuyda (44:24.720)

union, it was more, it's a bunch of really poor people without any way to make any, you

Eugenia Kuyda (44:30.720)

know, significant fortune or build anything living constant, um, under constant surveillance,

Eugenia Kuyda (44:37.640)

surveillance from other people.

Eugenia Kuyda (44:38.920)

Like you can't even, you know, uh, do anything that's not fully approved by the dictatorship

Eugenia Kuyda (44:45.800)

basically.

Eugenia Kuyda (44:46.800)

Otherwise your neighbor will write a letter and you'll go to jail, absolute absence of

Eugenia Kuyda (44:53.080)

actual law.

Lex Fridman (44:54.080)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (44:55.080)

It's a constant state of fear.

Lex Fridman (44:57.880)

You didn't own any, own anything.

Eugenia Kuyda (45:00.000)

It didn't, you know, the, you couldn't go travel, you couldn't read anything, uh, Western

Eugenia Kuyda (45:05.760)

or you couldn't make a career really, unless you're working in the, uh, military complex.

Eugenia Kuyda (45:11.840)

Um, which is why most of the scientists were so well regarded.

Eugenia Kuyda (45:15.560)

I come from, you know, both my dad and my mom come from families of scientists and they,

Eugenia Kuyda (45:20.580)

they were really well regarded as you, as you know, obviously.

Eugenia Kuyda (45:23.280)

Because the state wanted, I mean, cause there's a lot of value to them being well regarded.

Eugenia Kuyda (45:29.960)

Because they were developing things that could be used in, in the military.

Lex Fridman (45:34.800)

So that was very important.

Eugenia Kuyda (45:35.800)

That was the main investment.

Lex Fridman (45:36.800)

Um, but it was miserable, it was all miserable.

Eugenia Kuyda (45:40.320)

That's why, you know, a lot of Russians now live in the state of constant PTSD.

Eugenia Kuyda (45:43.640)

That's why we, you know, want to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy and definitely if as soon as

Eugenia Kuyda (45:48.360)

we have the opportunity, you know, we just got to it finally that we can, you know, own

Lex Fridman (45:53.000)

things.

Eugenia Kuyda (45:54.000)

You know, I remember the time that we got our first yogurts and that was the biggest

Lex Fridman (45:57.560)

deal in the world.

Eugenia Kuyda (45:58.560)

It was already in the nineties, by the way, I mean, what was your like, favorite food

Eugenia Kuyda (46:03.920)

where it was like, well, like this is possible, Oh, fruit, because we only had apples, bananas

Lex Fridman (46:12.600)

and whatever.

Lex Fridman (46:13.600)

And you know, whatever watermelons, whatever, you know, people would grow in the Soviet

Eugenia Kuyda (46:17.960)

Union.

Eugenia Kuyda (46:18.960)

There were no pineapples or papaya or mango, like you've never seen those fruit things.

Eugenia Kuyda (46:24.240)

Like those were so ridiculously good.

Lex Fridman (46:27.480)

And obviously you could not get any like strawberries in winter or anything that's not, you know,

Eugenia Kuyda (46:32.760)

seasonal.

Lex Fridman (46:33.760)

Um, so that was a really big deal.

Eugenia Kuyda (46:34.760)

I've seen all these fruit things.

Lex Fridman (46:36.240)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (46:37.240)

Me too.

Lex Fridman (46:38.240)

Actually.

Eugenia Kuyda (46:39.240)

I don't know.

Eugenia Kuyda (46:40.240)

I think I have a, like, I don't think I have any too many demons, uh, or like addictions

Eugenia Kuyda (46:44.160)

or so on, but I think I've developed an unhealthy relationship with fruit.

Lex Fridman (46:47.960)

I still struggle with, Oh, you can get any type of fruit, right?

Eugenia Kuyda (46:51.880)

If you get like also these weird fruit, fruits like dragon fruit or something or all kinds

Lex Fridman (46:57.880)

of like different types of peaches, like cherries were killer for me.

Eugenia Kuyda (47:02.080)

I know, I know you say like we had bananas and so on, but I don't remember having the

Lex Fridman (47:06.720)

kind of banana.

Eugenia Kuyda (47:07.720)

Like when I first came to this country, the amount of banana, I like literally got fat

Lex Fridman (47:12.920)

on bananas, like the amount, Oh yeah, for sure.

Eugenia Kuyda (47:17.520)

They were delicious.

Lex Fridman (47:18.520)

And like cherries, the kind, like just the quality of the food, I was like, this is capitalism.

Eugenia Kuyda (47:24.160)

This is delicious.

Lex Fridman (47:25.160)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (47:26.160)

I am.

Lex Fridman (47:27.160)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (47:28.160)

It's funny.

Lex Fridman (47:29.160)

It's funny.

Eugenia Kuyda (47:30.160)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (47:31.160)

Like it's, it's funny to read.

Eugenia Kuyda (47:36.800)

I don't know what to think of it, of, um, it's funny to think how an idea that's just

Eugenia Kuyda (47:44.280)

written on paper, when carried out amongst millions of people, how that gets actually

Eugenia Kuyda (47:49.720)

when it becomes reality, what it actually looks like, uh, sorry, but the, uh, been studying

Lex Fridman (47:58.640)

Hitler a lot recently and, uh, going through Mein Kampf.

Eugenia Kuyda (48:04.040)

He pretty much wrote out of Mein Kampf everything he was going to do.

Eugenia Kuyda (48:07.960)

Unfortunately, most leaders, including Stalin didn't read the, read it, but it's, it's kind

Eugenia Kuyda (48:13.480)

of terrifying and I don't know.

Lex Fridman (48:16.140)

And amazing in some sense that you can have some words on paper and they can be brought

Eugenia Kuyda (48:21.120)

to life and they can either inspire the world or they can destroy the world.

Lex Fridman (48:26.560)

And uh, yeah, there's a lot of lessons to study in history that I think people don't

Eugenia Kuyda (48:32.480)

study enough now.

Lex Fridman (48:35.520)

One of the things I'm hoping with, I've been practicing Russian a little bit.

Eugenia Kuyda (48:40.000)

I'm hoping to sort of find, rediscover the, uh, the beauty and the terror of Russian history

Lex Fridman (48:49.640)

through this stupid podcast by talking to a few people.

Lex Fridman (48:55.360)

So anyway, I just feel like so much was forgotten.

Lex Fridman (48:58.400)

So much was forgotten.

Eugenia Kuyda (48:59.400)

I'll probably, I'm going to try to convince myself to, um, you're a super busy and super

Eugenia Kuyda (49:04.960)

important person when I'm going to, I'm going to try to befriend you to, uh, to try to become

Eugenia Kuyda (49:11.000)

a better Russian.

Lex Fridman (49:12.000)

Cause I feel like I'm a shitty Russian.

Eugenia Kuyda (49:14.160)

Not that busy.

Lex Fridman (49:15.160)

So I can totally be your Russian Sherpa.

Eugenia Kuyda (49:19.040)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (49:20.920)

But love, you were, you were talking about your early days of, uh, being a little bit

Eugenia Kuyda (49:28.160)

alone and finding a connection with the world through being a journalist.

Lex Fridman (49:33.240)

Where did love come into that?

Eugenia Kuyda (49:36.200)

I guess finding for the first time, um, some friends, it's very, you know, simple story.

Eugenia Kuyda (49:42.680)

Some friends that all of a sudden we, I guess we were the same, you know, the same, at the

Eugenia Kuyda (49:48.920)

same place with our lives, um, we're 25, 26, I guess.

Eugenia Kuyda (49:55.400)

And, um, somehow remember, and we just got really close and somehow remember this one

Eugenia Kuyda (50:00.400)

day where, um, it's one day and, you know, in summer that we just stayed out, um, outdoor

Eugenia Kuyda (50:06.640)

the whole night and just talked and for some unknown reason, it just felt for the first

Eugenia Kuyda (50:11.240)

time that someone could, you know, see me for who I am and it just felt extremely like

Lex Fridman (50:17.000)

extremely good.

Lex Fridman (50:18.000)

And I, you know, we fell asleep outside and just talking and it was raining.

Eugenia Kuyda (50:22.520)

It was beautiful, you know, sunrise and it's really cheesy, but, um, at the same time,

Eugenia Kuyda (50:28.440)

we just became friends in a way that I've never been friends with anyone else before.

Lex Fridman (50:33.840)

And I do remember that before and after that you sort of have this unconditional family

Eugenia Kuyda (50:38.360)

sort of, um, and it gives you tons of power.

Eugenia Kuyda (50:43.440)

It just basically gives you this tremendous power to do things in your life and to, um,

Eugenia Kuyda (50:50.680)

change positively on many different levels.

Lex Fridman (50:53.920)

Power because you could be yourself.

Eugenia Kuyda (50:56.720)

At least you know that some somewhere you can be just yourself, like you don't need

Eugenia Kuyda (51:01.760)

to pretend, you don't need to be, you know, um, great at work or tell some story or sell

Eugenia Kuyda (51:07.920)

yourself in somewhere or another.

Lex Fridman (51:10.280)

And so it became this really close friends and, um, in a way, um, I started a company

Eugenia Kuyda (51:17.200)

cause he had a startup and I felt like I kind of want to start up too.

Lex Fridman (51:20.120)

It felt really cool.

Eugenia Kuyda (51:21.120)

I don't know what I'm going to, what I would really do, but I felt like I kind of need

Lex Fridman (51:25.720)

a startup.

Eugenia Kuyda (51:26.720)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (51:27.720)

So that's, so that pulled you in to the startup world.

Eugenia Kuyda (51:32.040)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (51:33.320)

And then, yeah.

Lex Fridman (51:35.680)

And then this, uh, closest friend of mine died.

Eugenia Kuyda (51:38.400)

We actually moved here to San Francisco together and then we went back for a visa to Moscow

Eugenia Kuyda (51:42.720)

and, uh, we lived together, we're roommates and we came back and, um, he got hit by a

Eugenia Kuyda (51:48.520)

car right in front of Kremlin on a, you know, next to the river, um, and died the same day

Eugenia Kuyda (51:54.520)

I met this is the Roman hospital.

Lex Fridman (51:58.440)

So, and you've moved to America at that point, at that point I was, what about him?

Lex Fridman (52:05.720)

What about Roman?

Lex Fridman (52:06.720)

Him too.

Eugenia Kuyda (52:07.720)

He actually moved first.

Lex Fridman (52:08.720)

So I was always sort of trying to do what he was doing, so I didn't like that he was

Eugenia Kuyda (52:11.960)

already here and I was still, you know, in Moscow and we weren't hanging out together

Lex Fridman (52:15.580)

all the time.

Lex Fridman (52:16.580)

So was he in San Francisco?

Lex Fridman (52:18.080)

Yeah, we were roommates.

Lex Fridman (52:20.540)

So he just visited Moscow for a little bit.

Eugenia Kuyda (52:23.400)

We went back for, for our visas, we had to get a stamp in our passport for our work visas

Lex Fridman (52:28.920)

and the embassy was taking a little longer, so we stayed there for a couple of weeks.

Lex Fridman (52:34.720)

What happened?

Lex Fridman (52:35.720)

How did he, so how, how did he, uh, how did he die?

Eugenia Kuyda (52:40.200)

Um, he was crossing the street and the car was going really fast and way over the speed

Eugenia Kuyda (52:45.280)

limit and just didn't stop on the, on the pedestrian cross on the zebra and just ran

Lex Fridman (52:51.520)

over him.

Lex Fridman (52:52.520)

When was this?

Lex Fridman (52:53.520)

It was in 2015 on 28th of November, so it was a long ago now.

Eugenia Kuyda (52:59.320)

Um, but at the time, you know, I was 29, so for me it was, um, the first kind of meaningful

Lex Fridman (53:06.120)

death in my life.

Eugenia Kuyda (53:07.760)

Um, you know, both sets of, I had both sets of grandparents at the time.

Eugenia Kuyda (53:12.840)

I didn't see anyone so close die and death sort of existed, but as a concept, but definitely

Eugenia Kuyda (53:18.880)

not as something that would be, you know, happening to us anytime soon and specifically

Lex Fridman (53:24.720)

our friends.

Eugenia Kuyda (53:25.720)

Cause we were, you know, we're still in our twenties or early thirties and it still, it

Eugenia Kuyda (53:29.880)

still felt like the whole life is, you know, you could still dream about ridiculous things

Eugenia Kuyda (53:36.120)

different.

Lex Fridman (53:37.120)

Um, so that was, it was just really, really abrupt I'd say.

Lex Fridman (53:43.840)

What did it feel like to, uh, to lose him, like that feeling of loss?

Lex Fridman (53:49.680)

You talked about the feeling of love, having power.

Lex Fridman (53:53.120)

What is the feeling of loss, if you like?

Eugenia Kuyda (53:57.520)

Well in Buddhism, there's this concept of Samaya where something really like huge happens

Lex Fridman (54:04.720)

and then you can see very clearly.

Eugenia Kuyda (54:07.160)

Um, I think that, that was it like basically something changed so, changed me so much in

Eugenia Kuyda (54:13.320)

such a short period of time that I could just see really, really clearly what mattered or

Lex Fridman (54:19.240)

what not.

Eugenia Kuyda (54:20.240)

Well, I definitely saw that whatever I was doing at work didn't matter at all and some

Lex Fridman (54:25.800)

of the things.

Eugenia Kuyda (54:26.800)

And, um, it was just this big realization when it's this very, very clear vision of

Lex Fridman (54:31.400)

what life's about.

Lex Fridman (54:35.280)

You still miss him today?

Lex Fridman (54:37.280)

Yeah, for sure.

Eugenia Kuyda (54:40.360)

For sure.

Eugenia Kuyda (54:41.840)

He was just this constant, I think it was, he was really important for, for me and for

Eugenia Kuyda (54:47.360)

our friends for many different reasons and, um, I think one of them being that we didn't

Lex Fridman (54:53.120)

just say goodbye to him, but we sort of said goodbye to our youth in a way.

Eugenia Kuyda (54:58.160)

It was like the end of an era and it's on so many different levels.

Eugenia Kuyda (55:02.400)

The end of Moscow as we knew it, the end of, you know, us living through our twenties and

Eugenia Kuyda (55:08.720)

kind of dreaming about the future.

Lex Fridman (55:11.600)

Do you remember like last several conversations, is there moments with him that stick out that

Lex Fridman (55:17.920)

kind of haunt you and you're just when you think about him?

Eugenia Kuyda (55:22.720)

Yeah, well his last year here in San Francisco, he was pretty depressed for as his startup

Eugenia Kuyda (55:28.920)

was not going really anywhere and he wanted to do something else.

Eugenia Kuyda (55:32.600)

He wanted to do build, he played with toy, like played with a bunch of ideas, but the

Eugenia Kuyda (55:39.880)

last one he had was around, um, building a startup around death.

Lex Fridman (55:44.680)

So having, um, he applied to Y Combinator with a video that, you know, I had on my computer

Lex Fridman (55:52.280)

and it was all about, you know, disrupting death, thinking about new cemeteries, uh,

Eugenia Kuyda (55:57.760)

more biologically, like things that could be better biologically for, for humans.

Lex Fridman (56:03.400)

And at the same time, having those, um, digital avatars, this kind of AI avatars that would

Lex Fridman (56:12.800)

store all the memory about a person that he could interact with.

Lex Fridman (56:15.920)

What year was this?

Lex Fridman (56:16.920)

2015.

Eugenia Kuyda (56:17.920)

Well, right before his death.

Lex Fridman (56:19.920)

So it was like a couple of months before that he recorded that video.

Lex Fridman (56:23.760)

And so I found out my computer when, um, it was in our living room.

Lex Fridman (56:28.180)

He never got in, but, um, he was thinking about a lot somehow.

Lex Fridman (56:33.080)

Does it have the digital avatar idea?

Lex Fridman (56:35.240)

Yeah.

Eugenia Kuyda (56:36.240)

That's so interesting.

Eugenia Kuyda (56:37.240)

Well, he just says, well, that's in his hit is the pitch has this idea and he'll, he talks

Eugenia Kuyda (56:42.160)

about like, I want to rethink how people grieve and how people talk about death.

Lex Fridman (56:45.960)

Why was he interested in this?

Eugenia Kuyda (56:48.960)

Is it, maybe someone who's depressed is like naturally inclined thinking about that.

Lex Fridman (56:56.000)

But I just felt, you know, this year in San Francisco, we just had so much, um, I was

Eugenia Kuyda (57:00.800)

going through a hard time.

Lex Fridman (57:01.800)

And we were definitely, I was trying to make him just happy somehow to make him feel better.

Lex Fridman (57:07.940)

And it felt like, you know, this, um, I dunno, I just felt like I was taking care of him

Lex Fridman (57:13.840)

a lot and he almost started to feel better.

Lex Fridman (57:17.000)

And then that happened and I dunno, I just felt, I just felt lonely again, I guess.

Lex Fridman (57:23.920)

And that was, you know, coming back to San Francisco in December or help, you know, helped

Eugenia Kuyda (57:28.440)

organize the funeral, help help his parents and I came back here and it was a really lonely

Lex Fridman (57:33.680)

apartment, a bunch of his clothes everywhere and Christmas time.

Lex Fridman (57:38.520)

And I remember I had a board meeting with my investors and I just couldn't talk about

Lex Fridman (57:42.280)

like, I had to pretend everything's okay.

Lex Fridman (57:44.960)

And you know, I'm just working on this company.

Lex Fridman (57:47.360)

Um, yeah, it was definitely very, very tough, tough time.

Lex Fridman (57:55.360)

Do you think about your own mortality?

Eugenia Kuyda (58:00.160)

You said, uh, you know, we're young, the, the, the, the possibility of doing all kinds

Eugenia Kuyda (58:06.900)

of crazy things is still out there, is still before us, but, uh, it can end any moment.

Lex Fridman (58:12.900)

Do you think about your own ending at any moment?

Eugenia Kuyda (58:17.640)

Unfortunately, I think about way too, about it way too much.

Eugenia Kuyda (58:23.320)

Somehow after Roman, like every year after that, I started losing people that I really

Eugenia Kuyda (58:27.800)

love.

Eugenia Kuyda (58:28.800)

I lost my grandfather the next year, my, you know, the, the person who would explain to

Eugenia Kuyda (58:34.640)

me, you know, what the universe is made of while selling apples and then I lost another

Lex Fridman (58:41.360)

close friend of mine and, um, and it just made me very scared.

Eugenia Kuyda (58:46.680)

I have tons of fear about, about that.

Eugenia Kuyda (58:48.520)

That's what makes me not fall asleep oftentimes and just go in loops and, um, and then as

Eugenia Kuyda (58:54.760)

my therapist, you know, recommended to me, I open up, uh, some nice calming images with

Lex Fridman (59:02.520)

the voiceover and it calms me down for sleep.

Eugenia Kuyda (59:06.680)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (59:07.680)

I'm really scared of death.

Eugenia Kuyda (59:08.680)

This is a big, I definitely have tons of, I guess, some pretty big trauma about it and,

Lex Fridman (59:15.000)

um, still working through.

Eugenia Kuyda (59:17.300)

There's a philosopher, Ernest Becker, who wrote a book, um, Denial of Death.

Lex Fridman (59:22.920)

I'm not sure if you're familiar with any of those folks.

Eugenia Kuyda (59:25.600)

Um, there's a, in psychology, a whole field called terror management theory.

Lex Fridman (59:32.320)

Sheldon, who's just done the podcast, he wrote the book.

Eugenia Kuyda (59:36.240)

He was the, we talked for four hours about death, uh, fear of death, but his, his whole

Eugenia Kuyda (59:44.720)

idea is that, um, Ernest Becker, I think I find this idea really compelling is, uh, that

Eugenia Kuyda (59:52.160)

everything human beings have created, like our whole motivation in life is to, uh, create