Anish Acharya

Yet if you're Google or Apple, you have a thousand committees that are explicitly designed to ensure there's never any persuasion, disagreement, or sexuality expressed in your products.

So I think that there is a pocket that startups can really thrive in, which is building these weird products that really touch on many core aspects of humanity that the models can reflect, but the big corporations are uncomfortable to release.

I mean, everything in companionship.

Every product in companionship has been both well received by customers and a little uncomfortable for the labs to build, perhaps modular.

I'm sorry, when you say companionship, you're saying like... Character, but also janitor, right?

There's a ton of products that are there for replica,

which is probably one of the most healthy and nourishing forms of companionship.

But all of these products are there, and they're there to facilitate friendships between people and technology.

And a lot of that stuff is just uncomfortable for big tech to do.

Would you encourage your children to use them?

Absolutely.

In fact, one of the products that I would love to exist, my request for startup, is what I call a contextual companion for my son who plays Minecraft.

My son plays Minecraft.

He plays it online.

He absolutely loves it.

You know, the other kids playing Minecraft may or may not be the best influence, often not the best influence.

I'd love to actually have an AI companion play Minecraft with them.

So there's this context in which they interact.

And I don't know, just sort of models pro-social behaviors and is still cool and chill.

I think there's a lot of room for teaching through these types of relationships and technology can help provide that.