Eugenia Kuyda co-founder of Replika, an AI companion. Please check out our sponsors to get a discount and to support this podcast:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Eugenia's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ekuyda
Replika's Twitter: https://twitter.com/myreplika
Replika's Website: https://replika.ai

PODCAST INFO:
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
6:18 - Loneliness
13:54 - Can AI alleviate loneliness?
18:13 - Love
20:49 - Russia in the 1990's
31:47 - Chernobyl
41:35 - Communism
49:21 - Losing a friend
57:55 - Mortality
1:10:41 - Replika origin story
1:59:37 - Bringing people back to life with AI
2:05:37 - Relationship with Replika
2:18:27 - Can you form a connection with text alone?
2:27:45 - Does an AI companion need a body?
2:30:20 - Her
2:37:24 - GPT-3 for conversation
2:43:48 - We should be nice to AI
2:46:52 - Book recommendations
2:53:45 - Russian language
2:58:41 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Eugenia Koida, co-founder of Replica, which is an app that allows you to make friends with an artificial intelligence system, a chatbot that learns to connect with you on an emotional, you could even say a human level, by being a friend.

For those of you who know my interest in AI and views on life in general, know that Replica and Eugenia's line of work is near and dear to my heart.

The origin story of Replica is grounded in a personal tragedy of Eugenia losing her close friend, Roman Mazzarenki, who was killed crossing the street by a hit and run driver in late 2015.

The app started as a way to grieve the loss of a friend by trading a chatbot neural net on text messages between Eugenia and Roman.

The rest is a beautiful human story as we talk about with Eugenia.

When a friend mentioned Eugenia's work to me, I knew I had to meet her and talk to her.

I felt before, during, and after that this meeting would be an important 1 in my life, and it was.

I think in ways that only time will truly show, to me and others.

It was an honor and a pleasure to talk to her.

Quick summary of the sponsors, DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and Cash App.

Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a Side note, let me say that deep, meaningful connection between human beings and artificial intelligence systems is a lifelong passion for me.

I'm not yet sure where that passion will take me, but I decided some time ago that I will follow it boldly and without fear, to as far as I can take it.

With a bit of hard work and a bit of luck, I hope I'll succeed in helping build AI systems that have some positive impact on the world and on the lives of a few people out there.

But also, It is entirely possible that I am in fact 1 of the chatbots that Eugenia and the Replica team have built.

And this podcast is simply a training process for the neural net that's trying to learn to connect to human beings, 1 episode at a time.

In any case, I wouldn't know if I was or wasn't.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

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

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

But please do still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description to get a discount, buy whatever they're selling.

It really is the best way to support this podcast.

This show is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club.

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

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I've been a member of Dollar Shave Club for over 5 years and actually signed up when I first heard about them on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

And now, friends, we have come full circle.

Now that I can do a read for them, just like Joe did all those years ago, back when he also did ads for some less reputable companies.

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Have so many memories of working late nights for a deadline with a team of engineers, whether that's for my PhD at Google or MIT, and eventually taking a break to argue about which DoorDash restaurant to order from.

And when the food came, those moments of bonding, of exchanging ideas, of pausing to shift attention from the programs to humans were special.

For a bit of time, I'm on my own now so I missed that camaraderie, but actually I still use DoorDash a lot.

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

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

Okay, before we talk about AI and the amazing work you're doing, let me ask you ridiculously, we're both Russian, so let me ask you a ridiculously romanticized Russian question.

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

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

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

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

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

You have a lot of friends, but at the end of the day, do you have like a longing for connection with other people That's maybe another way of asking it.

Do you think that's ever fully satisfied?

We're born alone, we die alone, but I view my whole life as trying to get away from that, trying to not feel lonely.

And again, we're talking about, you know, subjective way of feeling alone.

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

You think it's a subjective thing, but like, again, another absurd measurement-wise thing, how much loneliness do you think there is in the world?

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

Like how, I guess how many, you know, there's all kinds of studies and measures of how much, you know, how many people in the world feel alone.

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

But in your own perspective, how big of a problem do you think it is, size-wise?

Well, I'm actually fascinated by the topic of loneliness.

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

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

Yet it's actually proven and pretty, tons of papers, tons of research around that, it is proven that it's correlated with earlier life expectancy, shorter lifespan, and it is, in a way, like right now what scientists would say that it's a little bit worse than being obese or not actually doing any physical activity in your life.

In terms of impact on your physiological health, yeah.

So it basically puts you, if you're constantly feeling lonely, your body response, it's basically all the time under stress.

And so it's really bad for you because it actually like drops your immune system and your response to inflammation is quite different.

So all the cardiovascular diseases actually responds to viruses, so it's much easier to catch a virus.

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

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

Yeah, the statistics are pretty horrible around that.

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

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

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

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

Like in the UK, I mean, it was widely tweeted and posted when they were talking about a minister of loneliness that they wanted to appoint, because 4 out of 10 people in UK feel lonely.

I mean, I think that thing actually exists.

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

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

That is not objectively being fully socially isolated.

However, the combination of being fully socially isolated and not having many connections and also feeling lonely, that's pretty much a deadly combination.

So it strikes me bizarre or strange that this is a wide known fact and that there's really no 1 working really on that because it's subclinical, it's not clinical, it's not something that you can, well tell your doctor and get a treatment or something, yet it's killing us.

Yeah, so there's a bunch of people trying to evaluate, like try to measure the problem by looking at like how social media is affecting loneliness and all that kind of stuff.

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

And not that many people actually, but some, but you're basically saying how many people are trying to solve the problem.

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

Like if you just stick to humans, I mean, or basically not just the humans, but the technology that connects us humans, do you think there's a hope for that technology to do the connection?

Do you find yourself, like, again, if you sort of introspect about how connected you feel to other human beings, how not alone you feel, Do you think social media makes it better or worse?

I think it's easier to look at some stats.

And I mean, Gen Z seems to be, Generation Z seems to be much lonelier than millennials in terms of how they report loneliness, they're definitely the most connected generation in the world.

I mean, I still remember life without an iPhone, without Facebook, they don't know that that ever existed, or at least don't know how it was.

So that tells me a little bit about the fact that that might be, this hyperconnected world might actually make people feel lonelier.

I don't know exactly what the measurements are around that, but I would say in my personal experience, I think it does make you feel a lot lonelier.

Mostly, yeah, we're all super connected, but I think loneliness, the feeling of loneliness doesn't come from not having any social connections whatsoever.

Again, tons of people that are in long-term relationships experience bouts of loneliness and continued loneliness.

And it's more the question about the true connection, about actually being deeply seen, deeply understood.

And in a way, it's also about your relationship with yourself.

Like in order to not feel lonely, you actually need to have a better relationship and feel more connected to yourself.

Then this feeling actually starts to go away a little bit.

And then you open up yourself to actually meeting other people in a very special way, not in just add a friend on Facebook kind of way.

So just to briefly touch on it, I mean, do you think it's possible to form that kind of connection with AI systems?

Do you think that's engineering-wise a possibility to alleviate loneliness is not with another human but with an AI system?

And we see it and we measure that, and we see how people start to feel less lonely talking to their virtual AI friend.

So basically a chatbot at the basic level, but could be more.

Like, do you have, I'm not even speaking sort of about specifics, but do you have a hope?

Like if you look 50 years from now, do you have a hope that there's just like AIs that are like optimized for, let me first start, like right now, the way people perceive AI, which is recommender systems for Facebook and Twitter, social media, they see AI as basically destroying, first of all, the fabric of our civilization, but second of all, making us more lonely.

Do you see a world where it's possible to just have AI systems floating about that make our life less lonely?

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

I think we need to also make sure that what we're trying to optimize for, we're actually measuring.

And it is an orthometric that we're going after.

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

Because you can talk, you know, a lot of products that talk about making you feel less lonely or making you feel more connected, they're not really measuring that, so they don't really know whether their users are actually feeling less lonely in the long run or feeling more connected in the long run.

So I think it's really important to put your-

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

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

There's a UCLA 20 and UCLA 3 recently scale, which is basically a questionnaire that you fill out and you can see whether in the long run it's improving or not.

And that does it capture the momentary feeling of loneliness?

Try to trick you to answer honestly or something like that?

Yeah, I'm not familiar with the question.

It is just asking you a few questions, like how often did you feel lonely or how often do you feel connected to other people in this last few couple weeks?

It's similar to the self-report questionnaires for depression and anxiety, like PHQ-9 and GAT-7.

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

But still, if you take a big enough population, you get them through these questionnaires, you can see a positive dynamic.

And so you basically, you put people through questionnaires to see, like, is this thing, is what we're creating making people happier?

Yeah, we measure, so we measure 2 outcomes.

1 short-term, right after the conversation, we ask people whether this conversation made them feel better, worse, or same.

This metric right now is at 80%, so 80% of all our conversations make people feel better.

But I should have done the questionnaire with you.

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

But that's our, you should totally start measuring.

aim to outperform your current state of the art AI system in these human conversations.

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

So you talked about deep connection with other humans, deep connection with AI, meaningful connection.

People make fun of me because I talk about love all the time, but what do you think love is?

Like maybe in the context of a meaningful connection with somebody else, do you draw a distinction between love, like friendship and Facebook friends?

No, like, is it just a gradual thing or is there something fundamental about us humans that seek like a really deep connection with another human being and what is that?

Well, the way I see it, and specifically the way it relates to our work and the way it inspired our work on Replica, I think 1 of the biggest and the most precious gifts we can give to each other now in 2020 as humans is this gift of deep empathetic understanding, the feeling of being deeply seen.

Like that you exist, like somebody acknowledging that.

Somebody seeing you for who you actually are.

I think that is, that combined with unconditional positive regard, belief and trust that you internally are always inclined for positive growth and believing you in this way, letting you be a separate person at the same time.

And this deep empathetic understanding, for me, that's the combination that really creates something special, something that people, when they feel it once, they will always long for it again.

And something that starts huge fundamental changes in people.

When we see that someone accepts us so deeply, we start to accept ourselves.

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

So I think that is the ultimate therapeutic relationship that is, and that might be in some way a definition of love.

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

Now, on a slightly, and you mentioned therapeutic, that sounds like a very healthy view of love.

But is there also like, you know, if we look at heartbreak, and most love songs are probably about Heartbreak, right?

Is that like the mystery, the tension, the danger, the fear of loss, all of that, what people might see in the negative light as like games or whatever, but just the dance of human interaction.

Yeah, fear of loss and fear of like, you said like once you feel it once, you long for it again, but you also, once you feel it once, you might, for many people, they've lost it.

Like you're speaking like beautifully about like the positive things, but is it important to be able to be afraid of losing it from an engineering perspective?

I mean, it's a huge part of it, and unfortunately we all face it at some points in our lives.

Sure, well so mine is pretty straight, my story's pretty straightforward there.

I did have a friend that was, you know, that at some point in my 20s became really, really close to me and we became really close friends.

Well, I grew up pretty lonely, so in many ways when I'm building these AI friends, I'm thinking about myself when I was 17 writing horrible poetry and my dial-up modem at home.

That was the feeling that I grew up with.

I lived alone for a long time when I was a teenager.

So I'd just skateboard during the day and come back home and connect to the internet.

All sorts of poems, obviously love poems.

I mean, what other poetry can you write when you're 17?

But that was kind of my, yeah, like deeply influenced by Joseph Brodsky and like all sorts of quotes that every 17 year old will be looking at and reading.

But yeah, these were my teenage years and I just never had a person that I thought would take me as it is, would accept me the way I am.

And I just thought working and just doing my thing and being angry at the world and being a reporter, I was an investigative reporter working undercover and writing about people was my way to connect with others.

I was deeply curious about everyone else and I thought that if I go out there, if I write their stories, that means I'm more connected.

This is what this podcast is about, by the way.

I'm desperate, alone, seeking connection.

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

I mean, you're still fundamentally pretty alone.

But you're always with other people, you know, you're always thinking about what other place can I infiltrate?

And he's sort of like a trickster, and a mythological creature that's just jumping between all sorts of different worlds and feel sort of okay in all of them.

That was like totally what I would have been doing if Russia was a different place.

And a little bit undercover, so like you weren't, you were trying to, like you said, mythological creature trying to infiltrate.

What kind of things did you enjoy writing about?

I'd go work at a restaurant or just go write about certain phenomenons or phenomenons of people in the city.

This is Putin era, this beginning of 2000s,

What were strip clubs like in Russia and restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that early Russia that you were covering?

In those early 2000s, there was still a lot of hope.

There was still tons of hope that, we're sort of becoming this Westernized society.

The restaurants were opening, we were really looking at, we're trying to copy a lot of things from the US, from Europe, bringing all these things in, very enthusiastic about that.

There was a lot of hope and dream for this new Moscow that would be similar to, I guess, New York.

I mean, just to give you an idea, in year 2000 was the year when we had 2 movie theaters in Moscow, and there was this 1 first coffee house that opened, and it was like really big deal.

By 2010, there were all sorts of things everywhere.

Almost like a Starbucks type of coffee house or like you mean?

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Eugenia Kuyda: Friendship with an AI Companion | Lex Fridman Podcast #121