Chatting with Robert LoCascio- CEO & Founder at Uare.ai, Founder & Investor at KIDCompany from USA

So, I'm Rob Locascio, the founder of UR AI, and we build human-based AIs so that people can replicate themselves and then share themselves with others. And we have a big focus on professionals like doctors, lawyers, accountants, and then we also have people like creators who are writers and people who want to create unique AI experiences. So we actually launched the platform over a year ago and it was originally focused on legacy, like when people are going to die one day and they can leave themselves behind as an AI. And then basically that transformed into UR AI, you are AI, with a U, because we had a lot of clients come in who are professionals who want to create unique AI personas of themselves so they can share it with their clients.

I'm originally from New York, and I have previously started a company called LivePerson. And LivePerson, I invented when you chat online for customer care. And I started that company in '95 and then invented web chat in 1997 and then took the company public and grew it to being a multi-billion dollar business. And then left that business 3 years ago, but I was in New York before that. Today I'm in California. So when I started UR AI, I decided to come out to Silicon Valley and start the company here.

Yeah, my real... you know, I really believe that we need a choice in the world of a different type of AI than the current large language models that we have, like Claude and OpenAI and things like that. I really believe there's a whole other set of AIs which are individual AIs, small models that are based on your personality and your understanding of the world and your belief systems and the way you work, and that you should have control of your data. I think the biggest part that we're really focused on is that you control your data set, you control your model, you control your identity. And today we don't have that choice. We just have large language models just take our data, take our identities, and it's the whole concept that the machine is going to take our lives and our jobs. And I really think there's an alternative to that where you control it and your AI makes you a better person, makes you a better version of yourself, but it's you. It's human-first AI.

Well, you know, it's really two reasons. One is the origin story is my father passed away 10 years ago, and it was when my first kid was about 6 months from being born, my daughter. And as I have three kids now, and I would tell them stories about my father, and they would, you know, they have a connection to him, but they can never talk to him. And I thought, knowing what I know about technology and I was in AI for so long, I thought there's a power if we can replicate a person and they can leave themselves behind and they can tell the stories and be engaged with future generations. So that was one part of it. And then the second part is I just thought that every... there's the world of chatbots and even in the enterprise it's all about chatbots and all that. And I did that for customer care and I was a leader in that, pioneered that in that area. But I felt that this idea of human-based AIs would solve a lot of the big problems about the existential threats to humanity around AI. You know, that AI will hurt us or AI will take our jobs, or more importantly, the companies right now that control AI, they have a lot of power. And I felt that there needs to be a balance to that, that we need to put AI and the power in the hands of us, in the hands of you. And that's really what I wanted to see happen with what we're doing with UR AI.

So we're about to launch in about 4 weeks, and June 1st we'll launch publicly. Today we have about 5,000 users that are waiting to get in, and we have about 150 that are beta testing the platform today. So yeah, so we are basically preparing to launch this new platform. The Eternals platform has been out for a year and that has a couple hundred users on it. But the UR AI platform is about to launch in a few weeks in June.

Yeah, we actually... the foundation and what's unique to us is we built a thing called the Human Life Model. And the Human Life Model is basically your personal data sets, your professional data sets, your image, and your voice. And we are able to bring that all together in a single model called the Human Life Model, which allows you to express yourself in a very humanistic way. Your AI can whisper and laugh, and you can share knowledge of your AI. So there's a lot of power to it in really how we get into a person. And we really got there by working with our first clients and how they would give us these data sets about their lives. And we asked them personal questions about their lives. And we understood in those questions, in those answers, in those stories, there's all these really interesting understandings about how you make decisions, how you reason, you know, who you are as a person, your value set. And we're able to abstract all that and understand you as a unique human being, as an individual human being.

Well, there are seven areas to the Human Life Model, and each of these areas... and I can go through them for you, but each of these areas are... and I'll go through them. There's identity, world, story, mindset, drive, pattern, and growth. And these seven areas allow us to understand you, like what drives you, what's your belief on growth and how you grow as a person, what's your story, your basic life story, what's your worldview, what's your identity, you know, how do you look at yourself? So all of that allows us to understand you better as a person, and it's really based on these seven categories.

Yeah. So really two sets of people can use it. You could use it in your personal life as your basic AI. So I use it for asking questions and learning about myself and helping me with my work. So it becomes your main AI. So it does have a world model and it has even a real-time view of news, and then it has your Human Life Model. So all that's kind of working together. The second part is if you're a professional, you may want to share that with others. So you want others to be able to ask you questions about your work. You may want to share a framework of how you make decisions. For instance, my AI could write documents for you, could look at if you're writing a business plan, I could analyze a business plan for you because I've done business plans and my AI can help you. So you can share your AI with others and they can use it like a normal AI. You become like your own ChatGPT. And then the third part is monetizing it. You can on the platform charge people to have access to your AI and your skills. So there's really three levels. Use it on your daily life for yourself, share it with others, and then monetize it with others.

Yes.

Well, human... I mean, human... I call it a... So let's... our AI is not artificial intelligence. We call it authentic intelligence. And so it's not artificial. It's your brain. And so for us, it's human-first AI, authentically intelligent, all about supporting you as an individual. So you could be your best self and you have control of that. So that's kind of how we look at the world, not artificial intelligence and these giants. They're kind of like gods. These models are treated like they're gods of intelligence, and they're not, because the large language models are based on our data sets. If they didn't have our data sets and they didn't have access to those data sets through stuff that we put on the internet, they would be very dumb. Those models, not very. So really, let's put the control back and the intelligence back in the people and the authenticity back in the people.

Yeah. So you upload data, you can actually link any information from your social feeds, public URLs, videos, all of that can be just ingested into the Human Life Model. As you're chatting with your AI or talking to your AI, you can basically... it'll have memory. It remembers everything. It stores all that. So these are the big pieces to how we handle it. And then you own the data. You can delete it. You can control it. It doesn't train a model. It's just your model and you can see your model. You actually can see inside the Human Life Model and you can understand what your data set is creating. By the way, from your AI you also can create images and videos. We have this idea of thoughts. So you can create thoughts out of your mind and then those are small ideas that are also paired with an image or a video, and people can chat with your thought. So you can really chat with your thoughts.

Yeah, I'm one of the, I guess, godfathers of, you know, I pioneered the use of web chat. So, and the idea of human and technology, you're right. I've always had a vision of that.

Yeah, it definitely... the biggest part from my previous life is that I saw the communication between people through a chat interface. Then that became an automated chatbot to a human. But put that all aside, what you see in the data set is all this unstructured conversational data, and it's really rich with information. So I always saw it was a much richer data set than something I saw on the internet that was edited. Unstructured conversational data is just very powerful. So I thought if we could harness the conversational data, the story, that data set is more powerful than what's on the internet today. A lot of what we got on the internet, a lot of what the large language models have is edited information. That's why they're not very good at... like they're not very good at original thoughts. If you've ever used any of the large... like let's create something new, it always kind of makes it... it goes to the mean. It goes to like an idea, but you feel like it's not a unique idea. It's not a spark. It feels like it's got knowledge, but it's kind of giving you what's sometimes sort of obvious. Okay, I'm talking about new idea generation, not the functional aspects of a large language model doing work and editing things. And I'm not saying that. So, I think the idea is that I see in this unstructured knowledge set, there are things that are in your head that you've never put out there. There are things in your head that you never wrote down and put on the internet. There are practices in your business that you have not shared publicly, and that we call it zero-party data, is a much more powerful data set than what I see on the internet today. And that came from what I saw in my past with people chatting about all sorts of things about their life.

Yeah, you upload a picture of yourself. You record your voice for about 30 seconds. You upload some basic data to get started and you can start using your AI right away. So...

Doesn't matter. It just... it has to be you. You can make up an AI profile for yourself, but you can't share it and you can't go public with it. And when you go to get public, we have to verify you as a person through an ID so that we know that you are the person you say you are. So, you cannot share yourself with people and say you're Elon Musk. You know, you can't make anything up. There's no chatbots or there's nothing like that. They have to be human-based AIs.

Not on our platform, because everyone is AI, but they're all based on a real person. So, we're not... that's the thing. We're not in the social world. I think there's a lot of confusion even with content like videos and pictures, which is over there. You're always trying to guess is that AI generated or is that like generated from the past technologies like pictures and images like from your camera? We don't care. Everything on our platform, you know, is AI, but everything has to be based from a real human. So when you see a name of somebody, it's the person, but all the content and everything is... it could be generative off the data set of that person. And what you're going to find in the future is that the marketplace is going to benefit people who are more real, who put more data sets in that are personal. The marketplace will benefit them. If you try to make things up or you fake things, the marketplace will just not benefit you because you don't want to be ChatGPT knowledge. You want to be your knowledge, and that's what's going to be benefited in the marketplace.

I mean, this is like, you know, start with the personal... it's really good at helping you solve personal issues because it has your knowledge of your past. So I think on a very basic personal level it's really good to have a dialogue with to help you in your daily life. But if we look at the business side, like yesterday I pulled down on our platform. I brought an AI into my AI and it's an accounting AI. It's from an accountant who's a really good accountant. I had her AI look at our finances in our QuickBooks and give me a perspective on what she sees based on her methodology. And her AI was like, 'Oh, here's my methodology. I would look at this and this and this and I would do something different here.' And it all instantly gave me that information by just having her AI look into my QuickBooks.

Well, it's only humans. If we don't have humans, we don't have a platform. So, you can't make up fake AIs. You need human-based AI. So, yeah, humans are the basic. By the way, you need humans to power AI anyway because without humans, no one... the information that's in Claude and OpenAI is from a human. If humans don't exist, the AIs don't function. They need our data sets. But in our case, we're saying control your data set, control your AI. And for small business owners, they're being threatened every day. I mean, every day they're being threatened by the large language models saying, 'We're going to take your job. We don't need lawyers anymore. Don't need lawyers, don't need accountants, don't need doctors.' It's not true. You know, yes, there is a place for aggregated knowledge. Like I want a million views on some scientific theory or idea, but when I want to get help from a doctor based on something that's personal to me, I want to get a doctor who has a reputation, has real knowledge, who has experience, and whose AI I can get that at 3:00 in the morning. Like at 3:00 in the morning instead of going on Google and chatting with Google or you getting some general knowledge, I want to talk to a specific doctor about maybe something I'm having. So this is the power of the platform.

Yeah. Yeah. It'll work in any country. Exactly.

It doesn't matter. Yeah. They can have access to the platform. There's obviously rules and regulations around, you know, there are some government regulations and rules because we're here in the US, and we do have all the data like GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA compliant if you're a doctor so you can save patient data. So we have all these certifications so that if you are having sensitive data, we hold it and store it around the regulatory system between here and today Europe.

Best feedback I got, I mean, there's so much, but like there's a guy on the platform and he's really into his dreams. He's an individual. And he's able to talk about his dreams, talk to his AI about his dreams, and then he's creating videos and imagery around the dreams that he has. And so, and we're... I see it. We have a public feed and he's posting it up to the public feed and I can see these dreams. Then we have this woman. She runs a tax accounting firm and she's posting every day. Her name's Ashali and it's really interesting. She was saying like she's posting content of herself, a picture of herself. It's all AI generated and a thought for the day. And she was saying like normally to make this kind of content, to do all this stuff, so especially as a woman she said you like to prepare for a picture it takes a lot. And here every day she's generating like a thought with a picture or video and she's changing her outfits. She's changing the scenario she's in. After tax season she sort of talked about like I'm done, you know, it's like she was in an airport or something, but she created those scenes out of her head and they look real and we know they're AI generated, but they're still the scenes and images and ideas she wanted to create. So, they're wonderful.

Look, you know, when it comes to AI, either you're... you know, there's a saying, either you're driving the bus or you're the road that the bus is driving on. And I think for every business in the world, you've got to be driving the bus. You cannot be the road. You can't have AI models and large language models drive over you. And you have to move into the AI world. We make it really easy. I know how hard it is for small businesses to use AI for their business and for scaling their businesses. You know, it's one thing to use AI to write an email and write documents. It's another thing to use it in your business to really get leverage on your time. You know, this is a way for people to interact with you and get leverage on your time and maybe millions of people can interact with you where normally they wouldn't even know who you are. So, I think there's a real opportunity for the small business owner. That's what we're focused on, the professional, to accelerate the engagement with themselves on a personal level and then that's what makes you... you'll be the driver of a very fast car on that highway of AI versus you're on the pavement.

Well, first of all, you can use it in your daily life. So like I connected to my email, I connected to my finance package, I connected to my CRM system. So I'm using it in my daily life to create content. I'm posting off to LinkedIn with my AI. My AI thinks up the ideas for the day and sends them over. So we can use our AIs to do more communication with our clients. It also helps me create documents and ideas. And then I can share it, like I'm sharing myself, so people who are entrepreneurs can ask me questions. You know, I have a lot of knowledge on building businesses. Well, now they can ask me questions about that. So...

Sure. So you can train it by putting in... like I tell a life story. So the good thing is everyone has this life story about where they started in life and where they are and their dreams, and that's a really great first story. And then I put in documents and I've got a lot of interviews, so I put in my interviews in there, the ones that I think are really the best. So that's how it starts. And then as I'm chatting with my AI and having daily conversations, some of them I want saved publicly. So I have the choice to save them publicly and those become part of my public data set. All of that gets trained... that's all training the model every day. It's just your data sets.

How does it maintain what?

Yeah. So the thing is the AI is in a box and it's not connected to a large language model when somebody you share it with is interacting with it. So that's how it remains the same. It doesn't hallucinate. It doesn't make things up. It doesn't go outside your knowledge base. It's staying within your knowledge base. So that's how it remains the same.

That's correct. And it's auditory obviously because you're talking to an AI like this, then it's visual. We can do this... we don't do this yet, we don't do an AI you can talk to like this, I'm talking about a video, because I think they're still kind of weird and there's the uncanny valley and I don't like them yet. So when we get some place that I think we can do this, but you can talk audio real-time. And you can have a visual, you can generate visuals, you can generate a video of yourself talking about subjects on our platform. So you can give webinars and seminars on the platform and ideas. But so yes, I turned it into more visual, especially voice too. I think there's a power here to just talking to your AI. I talk to my AI in the morning and I give it information. I tell it to go send an email. I tell it to go find something for me and it does work for me, but talking to it's much easier than typing.

Right now I see like it's these professionals that give a lot of advice: doctors, lawyers, accountants. There's a whole group of influencers we have on there that are on social media about health care. So you have people who are like they're coaches and so they do corporate coaching or they do physical coaching for people's, you know, to work through their health. So there's a whole world of that. So it's really psychologists we have on the platform. So it's people who are constantly having to give advice to get paid for that advice. We also have a group of writers coming on and these writers have unique content that's just... we're moving into AI movies that you can talk to the writers. It's... we call it the writer's cut where you talk to the writer and you can chat with them about what they've written. So it's a very powerful thing that we're doing there too.

Yeah, I mean there's like Character AI and there's companies that have these chatbots that are trying to be replicating humans, but they're really like they're synthetic. So they make like a fake Elon Musk or a fake Einstein or whoever. You know, most of the AIs that are out there right now are synthetic based. They're just based on general data sets. Our AIs are human-based data sets. So they're based on the actual individual who created them. So that's a big change from what we're seeing out there right now.

No, I think you touched upon like a lot of it, you know, actually all of it. So I think it was really great. Yeah.

Yeah, I thought that's why I reached out to you. I think you got good energy. I think you're picking topics that are cool. So I just think, yeah, that's why I reached out to you. I thought it was kind of cool what you're doing. So, I would... I mean the one thing, my only suggestion is I would do a prep call. I would do one prep call to really get all the questions down. Although I think we nailed it here. I've done this so many times so I can kind of know how to direct it. But you would be better off if you did a 20-minute prep call and then you kind of did the whole thing. You know what I'm saying? So that's the only advice I would give you if you really want to. I had a podcast for about three years. It had about 10,000 followers or 5,000 followers, but I had like some famous people on and stuff, but I did a lot of prep before I did the call so that I could really understand them and then make them feel like they're important because when you do the prep, you know a lot about their life and you can hit a lot of the... versus like you could do prep with like a ChatGPT and say, 'Okay, find out what I should ask this person.' But it's not as good as you having like a brief conversation with them, you know.

I have interviewed diversified humans.

From all the countries. All the countries, more than 100 countries.

Yeah, you had a lot. I saw you have like a lot, like almost 500 interviews. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean this is kind of like... I mean this is the basics. If you can talk to people across and you've done all these interviews, you learn a lot on how to communicate. You're a great communicator. So it's like I think that's the basic... like I look at the basic function of my life is to communicate my thoughts in a very clear, coherent way to people I work with, you, and to the world. And so by doing what you've done, you've given yourself a skill that's like you can't learn it in a school, you know. You can't... you know, what do you do full-time? What's your normal job outside of podcast, doing podcast?

You do DevOps. That's cool.

You work at an outsourcer? Do you work for a company or an outsourcer? Which one?

Yeah, my dad was an entrepreneur, you know, my grandfathers were entrepreneurs, my whole family had built companies. So growing up, I grew up in that environment of like build companies and I guess I didn't know any better. I never thought about working for someone, I just thought about building a company. Out of college I started a company that went under, like it was a technology company and it went under in 1995. Then I started LivePerson. But my father obviously, because you know he's in my life every day, you know, I saw a lot of the basics of building companies and the ups and downs. I guess I saw a lot of that up and down. I experienced it as a kid. Some of it was good and some of it wasn't good. You know, it's like but it's a benefit. Like my kids experience... it's funny. I ran a big company, you know, LivePerson was like 3,000 people and it was public and it was, you know, half a billion in revenue and it had a certain structure to it, you know. I had a lot of people reporting to me and everything. Here I'm back to startup. There's 20 of us, you know, and it's like it's just got that startup feel, you got to be in the game. So, my kids are experiencing this world where I come home late and I wake up early and I'm like just building something new and it's good for them to see it, you know, it's really good and there's ups, there's downs. It's not always a great day. But I saw that through my father a lot of that. So I got a good front row seat of... I would love to copy things from him, things I would never copy from him, you know, and maybe my kids one day will do the same thing, they'll take the good from me and leave the stuff that's not good behind and they'll be better CEOs than I am, better builders, better entrepreneurs, you know.

Yeah, we have enterprise, we've got individuals. It's just think of it like an AI platform, but it's all based on these human-based AIs. So, we have a couple corporate clients, enterprise clients, and they see it as a way to take their best employees and have those best employees helping others with their work. So, that's how they see it. And those are really different culture businesses. These are culture businesses that believe in people, that believe they have great people and they have a great culture, and that culture could be translated through AI, through these human-based AIs.

Yeah. So right now, instead of... if you want to get yourself using AI so it can truly, let's say, replicate you so you can engage in your business activities on a more scalable way, because most small businesses, everybody wants to talk to you. So, we're one of the only platforms where you can take your business process, your personality, combine those together, and you can share those with others. So, they can get access to you and your business and how you make decisions, how you do things. But they can get that through an AI. So, at 2:00 in the morning, they could be engaging with you. Or if they're in England and you're here in the US, or they're in India and you're here in the US, they can engage with you. So you have to think it's like it breaks the borders. It bends time. So your time is no longer a function of how much money you can make or how productive you can be. I call it you really productize yourself. So you become the product that can scale, and that's what AI really allows you to do.

No. Yeah, of course. So...

Excited. And really, I think what you're doing is great and you have... so I can see you're creating all this content. By the way, I can also put you on our platform and you can play around with it because maybe that... you also are a DevOps person which is pretty cool. So like, but it'd be great to get you on the platform and you can share your expertise, you can create content. Be really interesting to have you there. I can tell you have the X factor. You know, obviously you're doing really great things here with this podcast. So...

I'm going to use this. I'll have Sonia send you a login so you can play around with it. We'll send you a username login again, the beta test. You can play with it. Tell me what you think and give us your feedback. I would love to get your feedback. So...

Okay, cool. Okay, sir. Thanks a lot.

Take goodbye.