Replika’s basic pitch is pretty simple: what if you had an AI friend? The company offers avatars you can curate to your liking that basically pretend to be human, so they can be your friend, your therapist, or even your date. You can interact with these avatars through a familiar chatbot interface, as well as make video calls with them and even see them in virtual and augmented reality. The idea for Replika came from a personal tragedy: almost a decade ago, a friend of Eugenia’s died, and she fed their email and text conversations into a rudimentary language model to resurrect that friend as a chatbot. Casey Newton wrote an excellent feature about this for The Verge back in 2015; we’ll link it in the show notes. Even back then, that story grappled with some of the big themes you’ll hear Eugenia and I talk about today: what does it mean to have a friend inside the computer? That all happened before the boom in large language models, and Eugenia and I talked a lot about how that tech makes these companions possible and what the limits of current LLMs are. Eugenia says Replika’s goal is not to replace real-life humans. Instead, she’s trying to create an entirely new relationship category with the AI companion, a virtual being that will be there for you whenever you need it, for potentially whatever purposes you might need it for. Right now, millions of people are using Replika for everything from casual chats to mental health, life coaching, and even romance. At one point last year, Replika removed the ability to exchange erotic messages with its AI bots, but the company quickly reinstated that function after some users reported the change led to mental health crises. That’s a lot for a private company running an iPhone app, and Eugenia and I talked a lot about the consequences of these ideas. What does it mean for people to have an always-on, always-agreeable AI friend?

Full interview with Replika founder and CEO Eugenia Kuyda : AI chatbots, marrying chatbots, Replika’s therapy app Tomo, friendship chatbots, LLMs, open source, and more.