Right now, AI is just an app on your phone. It should not be that way. Sometimes you need to sort of go big or go home. Not having the balls to do that, especially in this current environment, you can suffer the consequences. There's a huge mind trap that exists among builders in the space where they somehow think that voice is the main interface. That's because they are somehow thinking about the movie Her all the time but not in the right way.

So you were a true pioneer in the space before everyone else was doing it. Um maybe just talk about your reflections of how that category has has as you helped create it and then how how it's evolved.

It definitely evolved, I've noticed. It's pretty crazy. We had a very strong belief that it would happen but we still were so surprised when it actually happened. I guess this was just it just still felt like complete magic.

So Jenna, excited to get into everything you're doing with Wabby. First, let's contextualize this a little bit. When you look back at sort of the arc of of your career, perhaps the last decade, how do you contextualize what is the through line, you know, through Replica, Wabby, etc.?

Oh, wow. That's a um that's a hard question, but I guess the maybe the main theme uh is we're always early. Sometimes a little bit too early, sometimes hopefully this time around, you know, uh the right the right kind of early, the right type of early, but generally, yeah, I've started uh working on AI in 2012, so over a decade ago. um and was always fascinated by kind of the idea that you'll be able to talk to um to a machine to have a good convers meaningful conversation with a machine but more importantly with the fact that that could influence your life um in a really good way and before that was really the focus was on these AI companions AI friends that could really be there for you and help you live a better life help you feel better and now I guess it's just the same idea but applied to personal software like can we build many apps or software that will really help us throughout the day in a very personal way and we'll be focused on you on helping you live a better life.

Trace the journey of how you got excited about this new category and uh what you hope it becomes.

I guess while running Replica, we always had these conversations with our users about what other products they use and how they use AI. And it always struck me as strange uh that they were using products like CHP or Gemini Claude, but really they were mostly using it for very simple use cases like they were using Chik to just you for search or to help them write something uh help with homework or something else. And no one was really mentioning any of these, you know, exciting capabilities that we just kept seeing the models, you know, get. Um, and so we felt like there must be an interface problem. Uh, when people look at a command line or a chatbot, they really just see um, you know, search writing tool. Maybe I can talk to this. But if you think about that's the affordance of a command line like not really these are the main use cases. I think even recently tragic open I published one of those uh research whatever one of those studies showing that these are in fact the main use cases for tragic. I think a third of all all of the use was around writing um or writing help. Um and so that gave us an idea that there should be some next interface. There should be something else on top of this.

There should be something more interactive, visual, simple for um everyone, me included, to actually discover these amazing use cases that all these models already have. And so we started thinking, we got obsessed with this metaphor that the current chat bots are really the Microsoft DOSs era for AI um interfaces and that there will be some sort of a Windows Mac OS moment. Um, and I think the confusing part for for most people is that there is so much traction with chatbots anyway. Um, almost a billion people using these AI tools uh already, but they only use them for these kind of simpler use cases. And in order to unlock something else, you need a more exciting interface.

Paint more of a picture of what the world will look like when this Windows or Mac OS moment happened. What will that look like?

Well, I do think right now we exist um in the paradigm of, you know, when I was growing up, we had TV and um you know, here you had maybe a few dozen TV channels. Back in Russia, we only had six TV channels. Um and so then of course now uh TV still exists, but when now we watch YouTube and reals and Tik Tok, a lot of UGC stuff. And so I think the same will happen with um software. Right now we're kind of stuck in this world where are these few apps developed by professional developers. Um and then eventually of course we're going to move on to this new world where apps are built by all of us for all of us and maybe so and maybe sometimes by AI for us. So if you think about it the operating system of the future you open it up and you see your regular popular apps you use all the time. Maybe it's a maybe it's Instagram whatever it is. Um, and then you see maybe some cool apps that you discovered uh your friend your best friend's using or maybe you built for yourself or you tweaked one of the apps you found for yourself and then you'll see AI suggesting some apps for you. Maybe you're going to New York next week and there's you're into art so it made an art show finder app for you uh which is going to help you find art shows around the Airbnb you're staying at. So it's a lot more flexible, malible, and very deeply personalized. Think of it as an operating system built on the platform of you and not on some random um fixed context.

context. C can you talk about that? Like how we've always had this idea that software has to be durable because it's really expensive to make and it seems really serious. Like what types of ephemeral software like the New York Art Gallery app do you imagine existing?

Well, so right now we're already seeing tons of, you know, some of their first users building very specific apps that would never exist in on the app store. They're just too small. They're too personalized, too niche. They don't have, you know, 20,000 features. Like someone built um a a motivational quote app that's only pulling from like one particular show that I didn't even know anything about, but he's really obsessed with that show. And so he just wants that at 5:30 a.m. when he wakes up. Um it's really I feel like people are building very particular things um to fit their needs like right around for example I was uh putting my kids to bed the other day and my daughter wants to play these puzzle games. When I tell her something she's trying to guess what it is and so she we we built a game very quickly where it's a puzzle and then she sees four pictures she can click on one but she also wanted them to be about Princess Elsa and Princess Jasmine. And so we had to incorporate that. And so now she was so happy because now she's doing these puzzles, learning something new, and then we change it to Italian because she goes to an Italian preschool. And so this is another way to practice. And she's so excited. We spend the whole like we couldn't put this thing away. Um, and it took me 2 minutes to build it and then, you know, few seconds to tweak it versus going on the app store. I don't even know if an app like that exists, and going through 15 minute onboarding, paying paying again, then it's not really what she wanted. um there's no personalization there. So I think these are the use cases where something like that um you know should should happen and I do think in the future I should just be able to say hey I'm you know putting my kids to bed or it should know that context and just in you know maybe suggest a few apps that already pre-built for me that I could use right now.

It's funny. I just got a new iPhone and um on the new phone I got to to delete a bunch of my old apps cuz I like to start fresh and there were like probably over a dozen apps that I downloaded and in some cases paid for that I just totally didn't need anymore because I had built better versions of it on hobby. Everything from like migraine tracking to like tracking restaurant recommendations to like a really hyperpersonalized notes app to special things around image transformation in a particular style. And I can imagine that will be true for a lot of people, which is like instead of having to find this longtail app that's running all these crazy ads, popups all the time, and is hard to use and is not personalized to you, you can just make exactly what you want on the fly and and tweak it, which is another really cool part of the product. I think this is what and I'm so glad to hear that you're using it. But um for me that was the the kind of the product market fit with Wabby for me was around that where I found there were a few things I really needed and wanted an app for to track my weightlifting very beginner weightlifting workouts. I just figured out you got to go up in weight. This is I didn't know I would know a woman. Anyway, so I got this app and I was tracking it in app notes and I tried to find some apps on the app store and they're just

I think this is what and I'm so glad to hear that you're using it. But um for me that was the the kind of the product market fit with Wabby for me was around that where I found there were a few things I really needed and wanted an app for to track my weightlifting very beginner weightlifting workouts. I just figured out you got to go up in weight. This is I didn't know I would know a woman. Anyway, so I got this app and I was tracking it in app notes and I tried to find some apps on the app store and they're just

there's just so much in these apps that I didn't need and so I just wanted a really simple

I'm also trying to follow one particular book. I wanted the workouts to be based on that book. So anyway, I built a simple app to track these workouts. Um and then now anytime I go to the gym, I built it on the way to the gym, but now anytime I go to the gym, I find something else I want to add to it. First it was just a tracker. Now it's generating new workouts based on all of my inputs where I am mad, you know, the the the the book I'm I'm trying to follow whatever the ladder technique of like progressive overload. And so I put it all in the prompt and every time I go to the gym, I add a little bit to that. I want a little more of this, a little more of that. So now I'm not just using the app. I'm kind of the constantly in the process of tweaking it and republishing it to Wabby kind of mini app store. Hopefully someone will find it find it useful.

How how many people do you think or you know generally as you think your audience do you think it will be 9010 sort of consumption creation or do you think that most people I think one of the things we saw with Sora for example is that many people the majority of people are creating. Do you think that Wabby will be like that?

I hope that more people will at least tweak but I'd say like fully kind of original creators probably still under 10%. And what we're working on right now this week we're releasing we're pushing sort of a big update u the social graph. So you'll be able to see who is downloading what mini apps how they're using them. You're going to be able to see um comments or like mini apps. And so in this case for example if I created that workout app someone in comments can ask me to tweak it. They can also remix it and change it. You know obviously change the app however they want. But maybe they just want this particular app to be slightly different. So they could put in comments and maybe you know as a creator of course I'm going to be reading all the comments and changing the app to also um you know for these people to be able to use it. So I think this is cool because it creates all of a sudden um it's not just about building apps for yourself. It's really about discovering apps and finding what your friends are using using these apps together um and so on so on and even asking creators to you know change them in some particular way.

Amazing. Zooming out a bit um or segueing uh Anish and Justine, how do the categories or the topics that we've been discussing as it relates to personal software relate to themes that we've been exploring on the investing side in terms of you know what what got us excited here? Yeah, I mean look, I I

think that the YouTube metaphor is the right one that Eugenia outlined, you know, which is that we would have said in 2007 that 100 cable channels is enough or or six in your case. And you know, now obviously there's this entire ecosystem, everything from unboxing videos to all of the like very YouTube native content that exists. Um, and I think people are sort of have more content are more fulfilled by it. And then there's also the active creation. Some people create for a business, but many create and post just because it's fulfilling to themselves. And software has just been so restrictive because there's only 20 million developers in the world, you know. So, in a sense, all of the software that we consume is downstream of the preferences of those 20 million people. And it seems intuitive that if more people could make software, they would there would be a mass market consumer product here.

I think unlike many of the other products and you should comment on this that we've seen it feels like this is not text to app you know it's not a developer or developer adjacent tool it's truly a mass market consumer product for nontechnical people we I agree with you and we really made this kind of choice early on that we're never going to show any code or anything or say anything in the app that's even remotely technical no API keys no uh bring this whatever connect this integration or anything like that. Uh we do have integrations. You can add your apps and services but you can just say you know use my Apple Health or use this use that um or use my email. Um and we call them power apps. So that's sort of a more probably the most technical you're going to get here. But we wanted so yeah we wanted to make it super simple for anyone to make apps and to make this process very delightful. Um and almost to feel like you're just creating something really quick. you're not even really building many apps. Um, what we're adding right now is more I think the the company or the product we're looking at most most is Canva and the ease with which they're they're letting people create beautiful presentations. The similar kind of similar thing needs to needs to happen here. Right now we're talking about VIP coding a lot, but I feel like we should be more about Vibe kind of taste or VIP designing these apps. So, we're going to give a lot more of the just visual controls, more in the vein of like choose a style, choose, you know, some colors. You can go a little bit deeper, but really it's just one button and things look great versus um yeah, you need to go deep and just really um try to understand what to do and get technical with your mini app. Um and I do think that unlocks a certain level of creativity where all you need to think about is like what's the use case.

Um, one other interesting thing that one of our uh, investors Soleo mentioned was that apps, many apps could become kind of community starters. So, if today the app store is very much not social and it probably won't ever be social because of Apple's mandate for obviously privacy and how important that is for them. um which is great but in at the same time you probably do want to know who else is into I don't know toddler activities in Peter Hill. Um I want to know what other moms are going to an Italian preschool. Um I want to you know have their kids go to that preschool. Uh and maybe I don't know my designer is really into bird watching in London um in his particular neighborhood. So creating that app and finding some other people who, you know, could be a little bit of a community building um around that topic.

Yeah, I think there's a bunch of really interesting choices you guys made in designing the product that it feels like really built on the explosion in like vibe coding or building with AI, whatever you want to call it, in a super interesting way. One of which is like, yeah, for many consumers the existing tools are a lot more accessible than like coding something from scratch, but it's still pretty easy to like break them or get to something where you don't know what to do. Whereas I think Wabby, you've purposely put guard rails around the experience to make it hard to like super mess up, which is extremely helpful for consumers. And then it also feels like, you know, we needed to move beyond this paradigm of like great you vibe code a website and it it exists out there, but like is that the best interface for you to be using a product you want to use daily and storing personal information on and having your own records and like all of these sorts of things? Probably not. And for a lot of people like their phone is where they spend most of their time online. It's kind of their primary interface and where they want to use things. Um, and so obviously I know there's like challenges designing for mobile and that sort of thing, but it it felt like a really smart choice for you guys to start there just to get so much more deeply ingrained in someone's daily life or daily workflow.

You know, I've only pretty much built mobile apps.

Yeah.

If I really like the idea of mobile apps and a lot of things you're not going to be doing on, you know, really just putting in a website or whatever, some linkact. Um and I do believe a lot in the concept of an organizational layer like to a degree um the app store is the organizational layer for um you know the the mobile and um the browser the organizational layer for internet and so something like that should exist for coding I guess or for this new era of software for AI put let's call it AI software um and I don't believe that people will be I do believe that we're all going to be building some sort of software in using software that everyone builds some UGC software but I definitely don't believe in links that people will share with each other and with me relying on some random person somewhere who's not a professional developer to support the database for the app where I might store some sensitive data or at least data that I don't want to disappear even if it's not very sensitive

uh and we've already seen this with some apps vipcoded apps reaching the top of the app store I think the around women dating that all the super sensitive information got leaked and that wasn't because they are bad actors. It's just they're not professional developers. So there needs to exist some some platform where everything will live and to a degree we're not watching videos somewhere uh you see videos somewhere we're watching them on Instagram on Tik Tok on YouTube it's not like people are passing around links and so the current situation I do think is very similar to the very beginning of the internet where people were creating personal pages with geio cities and some other tools like that which I don't remember very very well because it was very little but um yeah before link LinkedIn people were sending these links to each other and of course now there's LinkedIn there are certain guardrails you can't really do everything the way you could do in geo cities but at the same time you have this get the social graph you get the platform you get all sorts of cool things there get the same as Shopify for e-commerce yeah you can build your own uh online store but no one's really doing it anymore everyone's just using Shopify and then they also get the all the platform benefits and I feel like the same will happen with Wabby yes you cannot download an app from Wabby and put on the app store, but you can use it inside Wii and you can get the social graph and all the integrations and the potentially the shared context between all the apps and the memory behind you know for for that um user and so on so on so on.

Uh our mutual friend Heaton said that Wabby is not just a collection of apps. It's a framework for memory, context and expression. Every time you create or share, you're teaching it who you are. Is is that how you see it?

I believe in it 100%. I think with every um I believe I still remember of course and you guys obviously remember too but I do remember how the first iOS apps were just people trying to squeeze those websites into an app format or just kind of toy apps like I beer or there was my favorite one I am rich that was $999.99 and it didn't it didn't do anything. Um, and then of course people figure out, well, you know, there's some something special about this being a mobile mobile app and maybe GPS and connectivity and things like Uber and Tinder came out a whole new categories of apps and so they figured out what's so special about mobile and I feel like for AI the super special thing is uh personalization but really deep personalization.

So for me, kind of vibe coding an app, but that still is sort of like the same old software that's not really taken any of your context into consideration where the data of that app is not exposed to AI that keeps learning. It's kind of just old school. I do believe a lot in Andre's um uh idea of like software 3.0, some next level of software that's super deeply personalized. So if you think in the context of a Wabi mini app, how can you personalize it? First of all, you can personalize the features, the looks, um, you know, where I've skinned the app in a a certain way. But then on top of that, you can also change the prompt. So, for example, for my workout app, um, I added to the prompt a couple things. First of all, the book that I'm reading that that method that I want to work out using that method. Also, the fact that I go to as a fitness and it has a certain I added a photo of that gym. So, kind of the model is not generating workouts in a completely different size of the gym. uh if it's a super side has to be next to each other. Uh so this is the deep deep deep level of personalization that that is following. And of course on the Wabby platform level the the mini app also knows that I'm a certain age that I live in San Francisco that I have kids these are my fitness goals and so on so on. And then eventually when I when I build another mini app maybe around nutrition those apps should be able to talk and pass along that context. And today, of course, all of that exists in just the, you know, the walled gardens. You're fully locked in in one app, which is to me feels absolutely crazy. Um, and I can't connect, if I connected my email or my calendar. It can't be connected to both of these apps. I have to go through the process with every developer all the time. They have to build it. I have to connect it. That seems crazy to me.

Do you imagine people building true social apps where the inapp experience involves a community?

I'd love that. And we're we're building multiplayer right now as we speak. We spend the whole day to try to figure out like what it's really complex just because all apps can be can have very different type of multiplayer and that needs to be explained to users as well in a very intuitive way. But yeah, totally believe in first of all using apps together at least with your friends, your family, but also potentially building these more kind of community apps where everyone can join. Maybe I can make my app multiplayer and open for everyone to join.

A good example of that is um made some image gen app around dogs uh where you can turn any of your dogs into like a royal um some user built it to like a royal portrait of different era. And so that would be cool for all the dog owners to just join that app and to be able to post to the universal feed. Um, and so that's something we've been talking about today because this would be really cool instead of if you just making these photos and then sharing somewhere, you're just adding them to the ongoing feed of dog photos.

Sorry, that's

Yeah, there's I No, no, I think it's a great example. I well yeah I'm definitely going to my dog

But I feel like there are so many examples too of um image and video prompt sharing that happens in very unoptimized ways today like I've been following a lot um as you know very well like teen girls and college age girls are often early adopters of stuff and they have been making all these like nano banana and Quen image edit prompts of like them like lying on a couch and the ghost face killers behind them for like Halloween and the and they'll like post the image on Tik Tok or reals or wherever and it will blow up and then they'll be like commenting like this long form prompt like in the comments on Tik Tok which makes no sense as a way to do it and then everyone's asking like where do I go to do this like I have the Google app why isn't let letting me do this and you have to explain like no you need the Gemini app and it just feels like there's already this consumer demand and consumer behavior around like prompt sharing in particular for creative stuff that could be done I've already made a bunch of Wabby mini apps for this and it it could be done so much better and I think that the creative community would really thrive with this.

Oh, that was the most and I guess this is why we started the company. Um, how is it possible that we have this god-like technology yet we pass around these text prompts which is almost like Microsoft DOS commands but worse because at least the commands were was like sort of like you could learn them. They were a few whatever like they were short. They weren't that long and now these crazy unstructured paragraphs of text sometimes you also need a reference image or something else. To me that's a little bit crazy. Um, and I think that is kind of one of the biggest problems with discovery with AI. It's hard to find these prompts. Even if you saw the output of, you know, you saw this cool photo with the ghost, whatever. But then how do I recreate that? I need to find the prompt. I need to know what app. I need um I need to know what model to choose. Oftentimes it's not even very intuitive. And at that point, I've just lo lost all my motivation to do that. Instead of that, if you could just quickly, you know, click on the link in comments on Tik Tok and open a mini app where everything's already set up for you. Just add a photo. Um, and you can see examples, you can choose different styles and this and that. And then you can see in comments what what other people are doing. I think this is the way to go. And I think what's most interesting that it sort of combines the vibe coding apps, one of the biggest kind of trends of the last year at least, and also just using AI. before that it was all you know it's either the are you in the text to prompt to app market or are you in some other market and this kind of puts together like this is really the one place to use um amazing prompts or and it kind of blends this difference

how much you know it's interesting you mentioned Justine that it's a mass market consumer behavior or or maybe like a future one to be sharing prompts this way how much do you think for the average person whose only AI experience has been with chat GBT that this is going to a surprising new behavior that they have to sort of adjust to or something that feels very intuitive and obvious and like wow I've been waiting for this.

I hope it will be easy because in the end of the day it's just a mini app. It's just the app graphic user interface. So it's something that we're all used to. You don't need to you learn how to use these new tools.

I'd argue it's harder to use a command line because you need to know well do I copy paste the text here? Do I edit an image right here with this prompt or do I edit later? It becomes a little bit more it's too loose. There's there are no guidelines. But everyone knows how to use apps. And um to a degree a lot of these kind of thin rappers uh blew up at some point like Prisma was one of them or Lensa where it was just like you know change you change your photo into some avatar

some headshot apps.

I do

high school yearbook.

High school yearbook. Yeah, it's clutch.

But a lot of, you know, they're awesome, but again, like there's a reason why apps uh like that gain traction and not, you know, people just passing along this this prompt cuz again, it's too high. Whenever there's uh the motivation is not too high, this amount of friction just kills all of my mojo. Uh I wake up in the morning, I'm on Twitter or Reddit, I find all these cool prompts, I'm like, I got to try it. And then I'm like, ah, copy paste. It didn't really work or whatever. I forgot about it. So that I think is something that at least we're super excited about. And it's not about just image on prompts, but also um some cool text prompts. Like people come up with all sorts of cool stuff. There's there are millions of people in the subreddits like Chudupt Prompt Genius, which I love those. Sometimes you can find some crazy stuff in it,

but you would never even know that this could be a cool way to use uh Chedupt unless you found it there. Like for example, someone made a fantastic prompt to analyze your blood work. Um, but again, I don't even at this point remember what it was and how I'm going to find it, right?

Um, versus I could just download a mini app from Wabby and kind of keep it in my health folder.

On the investment team, you we've said that there's, you know, the world has 1% of the software that that it needs and that the rest is going to be built in the next 5 years. So, let's give an example or say more about what that looks like if we're, you know, 100xing the amount of, you know, meaningful or impactful software.

Well, I don't know. I I guess I'm always going back to um how magical uh YouTube felt in the very beginning and all of these platforms where it was all really about just creativity and very raw um you know sometimes weird things like putting a home tape whatever home video on um online for Tik Tok. I still remember all my you know young whatever friends younger kids lip syncing to different music and how weird it was and felt like a toy and then all of a sudden became really really huge and I think the same will happen with um or at least we hope that the similar a similar trend will happen to Wabby where in the beginning maybe a lot of that will look like toys or something very simple very kind of funny almost and um in a sense and then eventually can grow into a much larger platform but I guess if you think about it like today we just treat apps as software but What if apps we could treat them as content? If I'm an health influencer or fitness influencer on Tik Tok, maybe I should put out here's my here are my five mini apps on why I build that are kind of showcasing my fitness protocol. Um, get them and maybe there's a way to monetize it in some way. Maybe it's a way for for that fitness creator to create more content that's now useful. Um, right now people sell courses and stuff instead of that. I think a mini app could be much better and then people can be talking about that in the community in the comment section. Again, this is a start of some community. People are working out together, people are doing something together. Um, I do think we'll see just a completely different type of software. Not just apps, not just stale fix apps, but more content, community build, uh, community starters, conversation starters, and and just fun little toys.

Do do you imagine like a creator class a kind of professional class on wabby? Oh,

a hund, you know. Yes, of course. I do believe that that ideally this should happen if if we're really thinking about as YouTube, that's sort of the last frontier at this point. Creators can make their own professional content, they can make videos, they can make shows, they can write, but they still cannot create software. It's still really not happening. But any anyone and especially small niche creators should be able to afford to create for free any software for the their fans. And that's what I'm really really looking forward to. I I've been struck that by the idea that uh you know Mr. Beast the biggest creator in the world has such a close connection with his fans. They do anything for him and the thing that he makes is chocolate. like that's the thing the thing that he chooses to that seems like the best monetization and it just feels like this is yet another sort of uh you know type of uh offering that creators can provide to be you know have a closer relationship with their fans.

Exactly. And if you think about it, just even the style, like I would love like certain designers, I want their apps that they build cuz I'm sure they're going to build very beautiful apps and I want to look at them and you even if it's the same functionality, the same whatever Pomodoro timer, but I want their take on it. Um, and so on. I think this there's so many different groups and niches that and it it shouldn't all just be about monetizing. It's really just about different styles, different um outlook on life, on the world.

Um and that is to me is very very interesting. I'm a huge user of Reddit and I find it very exciting because people just join around certain interests. Um and that doesn't happen happen on other platforms really that much. Um so that's something that I'm excited about here as well.

Yeah, I think from the creator perspective, one of the weird things about put and we're all kind of content creators in various ways and put out content and one of the weird things about that I think is you often you don't really know like you see how many impressions it gets but you don't know if those are bots. You don't know how many people are actually like using the prompt you posted or watching the full video or whatever. And I think that is going to be like even beyond monetization, that part of WABI where like you can see what someone else has done or created or accomplished or whatever with the prompt you wrote or the app you made or the thing that you developed um will be incredibly cool. Not only for existing creators for whom it's really obvious they want to do this, but also for people who are not creators today, but who have really interesting ideas and just like no way to build their own mobile app, get it approved in the app store, ship it, like distribute it, that that whole type of thing.

Yeah, like what other new class of creators could be?

Yeah, that's why in our style like in in in some of our communications, we're also trying to um I guess we're a little bit nostalgic about that early those early days of the internet and just being weird and staying weird. Right now, a lot of the video platforms are very polished and very commercial. Um you don't even see your friends anymore. You don't see that much weird content. You just see very curated, polished um stuff. But with mini apps, with software, I guess we're just entering this new era of just tons of really weird and fascinating um new mini apps that wouldn't even could never exist uh because they wouldn't be enough of a business on the app store.

Right. Right. Well, speaking of the early days, should we talk a bit about Replica and kind of your history in the community?

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe um we'll just so you were a true pioneer in the space before before everyone else was doing it. You know, you mentioned 2012. Um maybe just talk about your reflections of how that category has has you helped create it and then how it's evolved.

Um it definitely evolved. I've noticed it's pretty crazy. Well, it's wild because I we were thinking about it uh recently just talking to um one of the early employees of Replica that we had a very strong belief that it would happen, but we still were so surprised when it actually happened. I guess this was just it just still felt like complete magic. Um for me I got into it because I uh my friend worked at um Google DeepMind in 2012 and so he came to me to tell me about wordtovec and kind of the first technology to translate words into vectors and to be able to actually do something with words. Before that language was just this whole separate almost like thing that computers could not interact with but now all of a sudden they could. Um and to me I grew up reading Wiggenstein. So for me it was like well the limits of the uh language are the limits of my world. So I felt like oh well that's insane. If the computers learn language then they'll learn about the world that will be they'll be truly smart that is the future of artificial intelligence.

And so that's also imageet just came out. So we saw all these new models around image recognition and we felt like well we got to start a company focused on language models focused on dialect generation. Uh but of course there were no papers around it at all and no no known algorithms or anything built models um really back then there was nothing. So we're just focused on building some technology to build chat bots using whatever the trying to build some language models around that. And then of course 2015 the first paper came out of Google by Quad that would actually showed off the first deep learning um model applied to dialect generation and they didn't publish any models back then. So it was all about just kind of reading the paper and seeing some of the obviously cherrypicked results and trying to replicate that. And when we saw that in August 2015, we just basically put all of our um bet everything we had at the company on building those models. We said, "Okay, well, this is it. This is right around the corner. We need to really focus on building these language models, getting the first generative AI product out chatbot out there, which we did with Replica, but it wasn't around the corner. It was like seven years away."

And then we just had to survive for long enough to actually get to the first transformer models. Um and then of course I think the next magical moment was the um Mina paper also out of Google with the first transformer model. And then I remember in 2020 we got invited by OpenAI to go see um GP3 before you know API to to partner up with them to be one of the first partners uh for GP3 API to launch. So we came to the office and Meera who back then was actually leading partnerships. Um and Sam showed us GP3 and I remember that was just I was floored. It was insane just to before that if you think about it we had to train every model. We had to create the specific data set. If you wanted to train a dialogue model you have to have tons of chat data and you would train the model and the model could only do dialogue. But with GT3, it was the first kind of zeroot few shot model where it could do anything. It didn't just have to um respond in a dialog format. You can tell it well write a tweet like Sam Alman or write a tweet this or translate and it would do that. And so that felt absolutely magical and we were the first uh one of the first partners of OpenAI GPT3 API. Um they it was still crazy because we still have a Slack channel where Greg Brockman is training a model for us which now feels just such a amazing weird reversal.

You still have the model.

Um it it was it just I think it was a fine-tuned da Vinci for um replica but we were the biggest customer in terms of API calls because we we were the only chatbot available in the market that actually used generative AI and now it's weird to think about it but uh back then all the big companies were scared to put out generative AI uh products because there were Microsoft tie happened and it turned into some Nazi chatbot in literally an hour an hour and so everyone else was too scared to put them out there. So we were sort of the only ones for so so long until open eye had um you know put out their chip and kind of change change history with that of course. Uh but it was crazy because for before that we literally owned all the keywords like AI chatbot artificial intelligence on every single platform and um and then we also owned like hundreds of AI domains which I just let expire because I felt like no one wants them. They're not even on any of the big domain platforms.

And then recently I went to see what.ai uh domains still are still available that are just regular words and the only words that are available like vomit.ai and Iraq.ai. I was telling my god this is so upsetting. Um naming Wabby because of that was pretty hard.

Yeah. So that's kind of the evolution from my

You told us a story at dinner about the time that you'd spent in the OpenAI office. Maybe talk a little bit about that when you guys were working out of there. What it was like, what the energy was like, what were the expectations of the team?

I think that Yeah. So when um when openi started was kind of out of YC um it was YC research. So they were doing a few I guess you remember they were doing a few different research groups. one on uh UBI, one on AI, some other ones. And so because we were YC company and um they let us come, they were very uh uh generous with their time and they would let us come to back then Greg's apartment where they were uh headquartered I would say and they would let us come with a couple other companies uh that were doing AI at YC to um ask questions, learn from them and just talk maybe exchange experience on what we're building. So we would come to that apartment and ask all the questions. Um usually it was um Ilia and Andre and some other people and that was absolutely incredible. We were of course absolutely starruck um and super happy to be there. just so, you know, grateful for the opportunity. And then they moved to the um to their office and we would go there as well. And um very quickly they stopped working on language models. And we were very upset because we really wanted to continue going there, but they didn't want to talk about any language models because no one was really working on them. Um, and that may have made us feel very um, strange because we were so set on continuing and believing in language models, but they completely moved away to shifted to playing video games and all of these kind of agents kind of rebuilding the worlds and agents in those worlds reinforcement learning for that and all and and all these other interesting things. Um and I guess the only person for um if in the beginning it was kind of Alec Ratford for continued to work on language models. So we had an opportunity to ask him some questions but yeah of course that was it's just wild to think to think that because when we were going to open of course they were uh superstars even back then but still it felt like such a small uh kind of research group um that is trying to do something interesting. Of course, now to see it become one of the biggest companies in the world is absolutely wild.

Well, it's interesting because Andre said on the recent pod that the entire video games direction was an incorrect direction. It was incorrect research direction and they probably should have stuck with language.

So you guys were right.

Um it's a well being right is not always

you got to be right but also execute. I think to a degree we we were really invested with replica in building language models but at some point we just required a lot more capital to do that and after being after working on that for so long at that point we just got really into just revenue maxim maximisation at some point because we a little bit got maybe scared we're like well

we didn't have the balls to say okay well we need 20 million and we'll build that model even though that was our discussion internally right after Mina uh paper and so on. We just need to get a lot more money. If you think about it with um Replica, we only raised $1 million and I guess it's still all in the bank and you know we we went for many many years and um built a big business. But of course, this is in hindsight a very interesting lesson that sometimes being very nimble and very kind of scrappy and very profit oriented is great, but you can miss out on almost like a generational chance. And I's not saying we, you know, even if we bet on it, maybe we would have not built it. Um, I would never compare myself to the geniuses that actually did it. we probably were not the right people anyway, but still the the lesson I think still stands. Sometimes you need to sort of go big or go home

and not having the balls to do that, especially in this current environment, I think you can suffer the consequences.

One of the things we say on the consumer team is consumer behavior, especially new behavior, cannot be predicted. It can only be observed. I think you are actually one of the few people that is not true for because you seem to be able to predict consumer behavior. Like you've been so early to a number of these things and I think just every time we talk to you, you seem to have an eye on not only like what's going on today, but like what the next thing should be. Is that like how did you develop that sense? I guess I'm sure a lot of people would be curious to know.

I don't know if I have that sense. I only have like a couple ideas, but I really believe in them deeply and then I go really deep down the rabbit hole. I start thinking about it and um but I do think that I do have a lot of um I do have a background in journalism and I pretty much the whole I grew up dreaming of being a journalist. I my first job was 12 years old working at newspaper. Um I was an investigative journal reporter for a while and the one thing I loved about is being able to go and talk to people and to really really try to get to know them and live their lives. Um and so for that you sort of have to have a lot of empathy and just trying to really and curiosity about people. And I think today what I'm seeing with AI especially it's being built by a very specific type of person uh personality. It's often times these savants, these like brilliant geniuses, um, physicists, mathematicians, and they're insane in building algorithms and math and kind of, uh, scientific breakthroughs, but they usually lack on the human empathy side. That's just kind of how it is.

Meanwhile, I'm the opposite. I'm a uh, dumb dumb when it comes to science. Coming from a family of physicists, they were always like, "Oh my god, like why can't you be smart and also go study physics?" But I couldn't. But at the same time, I'm just really interested in human condition, what people are doing. And just seeing my mom trying to understand how to copy paste a prompt from Reddit. It was such a foreign idea for her to her. And I realized like my mom is very savvy with computers. She's always on her phone. She's always on her laptop. But somehow she can't crack that. this is just too this is just not user friendly enough and kind of understanding those concepts and um I think was really what let us see kind of come up with the idea for Wabby and the same goes for replica just traveling around um uh and talking to people and seeing how much loneliness there is and how much people just want to be able to tell someone what they're going through and how few people are able to listen and I think that realization that maybe an AI is not can't talk well today, but it could listen. Uh that that could be a groundbreaking thing for millions in the world. Um so I think this is kind of what just allows me to have a slightly different angle at the same problem.

If you wanted to speculate on the future of like hardware um like what is sort of the that hardware just like like you know 5 10 years what is going to be the interaction like how are we going to be interacting with these applications?

Um, I do have a few ideas around hardware and I'm not a hardware person at all, but I'm a hardware user like all of us. So, I get to have opinions. I think I think where there's a huge mind trap that exists among uh builders in the space where they somehow think that voice is the main interface. It's like the best ultimate interface. And I think that's because they are somehow thinking about the movie her all the time but not in the right way and kind of missing the whole point of the movie her that um yes voice was amazing in that movie because it was Samantha Johansson constantly heavy breathing his ear and that totally worked. You didn't even need to see anyone. Um

in my case that's why that worked. But if you really think about voice interfaces they're just so imperfect. Um, you can't use that device if you're laying in a bed with someone who's sleeping. You can't use it in a crowded space. You can't use it at a at the office. You can't use it even walking around. It's a little bit weird. And and so all of a sudden, you're betting everything. There's a lot of people trying to build voice only devices. In my case, completely wrong. like it can be a fantastic extra way to interact with uh the computer, but every single Alexa right now is like 75% of them are being shipped with a screen. Uh because even if I'm setting a timer when I'm cooking, the proverbial um voice use case even dancer I need to see the timer. I'm not going to be asking, hey, how much how long is this left every every second? Uh this is just strange. And so I think this is kind of the the biggest mistake mistake in my in my view is trying to ship these screenless devices. Uh I love screens. I think there's no way with voice to solve for discovery for proactivity.

I would hate if you know the worst thing with um voice and the iPhone is is reading out push not notifications text messages that are come. I'm like God please shut off. It's horrible. It's very hard also to turn it off.

That's terrible. if this was just being you want productivity but you don't want it to be read out loud in your ear because this is just this very uh slow way of getting information in your brain. Um so anyway so I think this is kind of the biggest mistake.

I would not ever make a screenless device. In fact I would make it very much uh screen first device but I do believe that the AI device is not about a voiced driven thing. It's more about um building this uh AI first operating system. Um having all the models run locally as well. I think that there's a lot in that like building truly an AI first smartphone and you know not today kind of more CPUdriven whatever um hardware but more the hardware of the future where there are models that can run locally with the operating system is super different from what it is today with no fixed apps with being able to change and create software on the go for you with a with a level of personalization that goes a lot deeper than what it is today. Um, yeah, I think that there is definitely space for a device like that right now. You know, AI is just an app on your phone. Uh, it should not be that way. Um, I guess

I think it's a great note to end on. Eugene, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.