Behind The Bots

Dara Ladjevardian, the cofounder of Delphi AI, an artificial intelligence platform for digital cloning talks about his amazing tool in this most recent episode. Delphi allows users to create a personalized AI clone of themselves that can have conversations via chat or voice calls. The clones capture an individual's personality, knowledge, speech patterns, and thinking.

Ladjevardian shares how he came up with the idea while working on AI at previous startups. He wanted to create a digital version of his late grandfather to get advice. This evolved into a book club experimenting with cloning authors, eventually becoming the Delphi company. The goal is to democratize access to expertise by letting clones share knowledge on-demand 24/7.

Use cases span from coaching and consulting to customer service and lead generation. One Delphi clone already earns its creator $8k per month. The artificial intelligence keeps improving through customer conversations and clone self-assessments. Upcoming features include video and multi-platform messaging. Ladjevardian believes digital cloning with AI (artificial intelligence) can help people better scale their time, influence and availability. 


DELPHI AI

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dara@delphi.ai


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Creators & Guests

Host
Ryan Lazuka
The lighthearted Artificial intelligence Journalist. Building the easiest to read AI Email Newsletter Daily Twitter Threads about AI

What is Behind The Bots?

Join us as we delve into the fascinating world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by interviewing the brightest minds and exploring cutting-edge projects. From innovative ideas to groundbreaking individuals, we're here to uncover the latest developments and thought-provoking discussions in the AI space.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Start with the background. Originally from Houston, Texas. I studied physics and computer science in college and then immediately worked at an AI company called C3 AI. And this was applying AI to the enterprise, so, like, oil and gas companies, finance companies, defense tech companies. And while I was at c 3, GPT 3 came out, and I was kind of working on NLP at c 3.

Dara Ladjevardian:

So this was kind of, like, the next evolution of NLP. So I left c 3 and started my first company, which was called Friday. It was an AI assistant for shopping, so you could text a phone number and be like, hey. I want a brown corduroy jacket. This is my size.

Dara Ladjevardian:

This is my budget. Go and buy it for me, and it would buy it for you. And while I was working on that startup, I was reading a book about my grandfather, and I wanted to be able to talk to him for advice because I was a solo founder and I was trying to figure out, you know, what the hell I should do. So I created a clone of him using his book and kind of treated it as my own personal mentor. And Friday got acquired, and I moved to Miami to work at OpenStore, but this idea of letting people clone themselves kinda really stuck with me.

Dara Ladjevardian:

So I met my cofounder at OpenStore. We started a book club where we started to create clones of the authors of all the books we are reading in book clubs so that we could all learn from them directly.

Ryan Lazuka:

Wait. You mean you you actually have a book club that you actually go to and talk about books and not just drink wine like my wife does?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. No wine. It's it's in the open store office. So, that would be Keith Keith was okay with the book club without the wine.

Ryan Lazuka:

Alright.

Dara Ladjevardian:

So, yeah, Sam and I left to start Delphi, which is a digital cloning platform that allows people to create a clone of themselves that can speak like them, that that can think like them so that people can access them when they're busy. It really helps people scale their influence, their knowledge, and their time to as many people as possible.

Ryan Lazuka:

Awesome. Is your grandpa did you do it because he he passed

Dara Ladjevardian:

because with Delphi, we're not just trying to capture just what you know and do, like, a basic q and a bot. We're also trying to capture how you think because when people ask you for advice or your perspective, it's applied wisdom. It's not just copy paste wisdom.

Ryan Lazuka:

Got it. Yeah. It's it's very interesting. Like, AI girlfriends and things like that have really gained a lot of traction lately. Like, you see that all over YouTube.

Ryan Lazuka:

No one really talks about talking to someone that's passed away. Like, my dad passed away when I was 10 years old, and I've thought about, like, trying to, like, get all the information I have on him and and, like, clone him. And, like, it'd be it's gotta be very, I don't know, like, weird and amazing all at the same time. So that's something that your your your tool can help with. You already did it with your grand grandfather, but it's like this idea of immortality where people can sort of live forever in their in their consciousness by what you what data you have about them in the past.

Ryan Lazuka:

So I might I might give it a shot. It's pretty pretty incredible, where we're headed here with AI.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. We don't we didn't start with the death tech market just because it it's like a tough market to start and try to go horizontally. So while we do have customers who are using it for that, our main focus right now is are, like, coaches, experts, creators, CEOs, people who are super busy and wanna scale themselves.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. Awesome. How many people are in your company? You're the founder. Correct?

Ryan Lazuka:

Or is there a cofounder?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Cofounder and CEO. Man, my cofounder, at OpenStore, he's the CTO, and we're 7 people now. And we're based in San Francisco, fully in person. I hate remote work, so it's good to all be here.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. I think it's definitely overrated being at home all the time. So Yeah. You get out and talk to people. So, like, how would it work in terms of, you know, someone comes to your site, they wanna clone themselves, and maybe you could go over why someone would wanna clone their clone themselves first.

Ryan Lazuka:

But once they do decide that they wanna do that, how does it work in terms of them, like, getting onboarded, and how does it work in terms of uploading all the documents? Is it easy? Is it hard? How how does it work for the end user?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. So I'll start with the why, and, the why for the demand side of the curve is pretty obvious. You're a consumer and only people with a lot of money or people in tight networks have access to the kind of personalized expertise that, you know, that could change your life. And Bloom's 2 Sigma shows that private tutoring increases your ability to learn by 2 standard deviations. Not everyone can access this kind of tutoring.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Not everyone can learn from, like, Keith Rabois or Balaji or Naval or, you know, any of the world's greatest thinkers. So on the demand side, it's really democratizing access to expertise, personalized expertise. And for the supply side, a lot of these people get the same questions over and over again. So one, it allows them to scale their time. 2, a lot of people create content and that content is passively consumed.

Dara Ladjevardian:

You know, you read it once and you think about how it applies to your life and that's it. The thing about having a clone, it's like interactive personalized content consumption, where every time I come, it's almost different because my life circumstances are a little different and the bits and pieces that might resonate are are going to pop up differently depending on where I am in life. So that's another way to look at it. Finally, we have a lot of people who maybe will charge a certain amount of money for an in person meeting and they charge a lot, lot less for, like, a subscription to their clone. So it's proving to be an entirely new revenue stream for some of these clone creators.

Ryan Lazuka:

Cool. And for the clone, like, once you create the clone and then say if someone has a subscription to your clone, how does it look? Is someone like, are you talking to an avatar? Is it all chat based, text? How does it work for the end user?

Dara Ladjevardian:

So we have chat and voice. Mhmm. The chat could be in the form of SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Instagram. And then voice, you can call them and have a real time conversation. We'll be releasing video probably in April this year.

Ryan Lazuka:

So you video, like, meaning, like, if I wanna clone myself, I would up like, the AI model would learn about video that I upload, like, what I look like and things like that, and then it would sort of, like, move my lips to whatever words the AI is saying at the time. Is that how it would work?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. So as of right now, I probably could have sent my clone to this podcast.

Ryan Lazuka:

That would be amazing.

Dara Ladjevardian:

You could have spoken to him, but you would not be able to see him. At at a certain point, it's my face and it's my clone talking, but it's not actually me.

Ryan Lazuka:

Okay. Yeah. We'll have to we'll have to do that one day. Do a podcast with a clone. That'd be that's a great idea.

Ryan Lazuka:

And and the last time we spoke, you said that one of the big use cases is for, like, property managers. So, like, a property manager is someone for someone that's not familiar with real estate is, you know, you you have a house and you're renting it out to people, and the people are gonna call somebody to get you know, if their toilets broke or something like that, they're gonna call somebody, and that's the property manager to fix fix the toilet. Well, this will be a great tool for that because you could have your the clone be the property manager and would save you a ton of time and headaches. Because most of the times, for real estate at least, is if a problem does happen, a lot of the times you can talk it through, talk the runner through over the phone, like, how to fix things rather than send someone there that's gonna cost $200 an hour for a plumber in this example. So it's a huge time saving.

Ryan Lazuka:

Are there any other thing if you wanna elaborate on that, that's cool. But is there anything other than that that, you know, you see people doing with your tool?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Well, I think the idea of, you know, scaling yourself to your customers who have questions that you've already answered and your clone being able to guide them towards a solution is pretty powerful. And, like, I have my clone in the clone studio of every customer who's creating a clone, and that has saved me so much time. They're they're, like, wondering, okay. How can I improve the personality? Or, like, how can I improve the voice?

Dara Ladjevardian:

And my clone handles all these conversations, and it's kinda relevant to the real estate developers who maybe have to answer all these questions for tenants. So I've talked about the coaches and the experts, but also just business owners who get a lot of the same questions from employees or customers can leverage this to save that inbound.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. And my wife and I were trying to start a coffee shop, over the last year. It didn't work out, but we had some, consultants and mentors, and this would be a great tool for someone like them because, you know, they charge you know, some people can charge 200, $300 an hour or a $100 an hour, but that's, you know, a lot of that might be that might be a low cost for them, but it's a high cost for the person that actually needs the advice. So this is like a happy in between because the person that's charging a lot of money, say, 200, $300 an hour to consult somebody, they don't have the time to do it, but they still want paid, and they can just, like, create their clone that that do it for them. So, like, for example, you know, we we spoke with a lot of coffee shop owners, and we paid them to do that, but they could have just sent their phone to me, and that probably would have been just as good.

Ryan Lazuka:

It's like, it's a it's a great use case.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. And one thing that that I wanted to point out is that this isn't meant to replace humans entirely because I think some people might say, hey, isn't this going if, like, you're if you're a consultant or if you do charge per hour, some people might say, hey, isn't this gonna kinda ruin my business? I personally think the experience with the human is the best case scenario, just not everyone is willing to pay that money. So the people who are willing to pay that money, you'll still get because they're willing to pay that money to sit with you. And other people will now be able to access for you at a much lower cost.

Ryan Lazuka:

Right. Like, the people that, you know, say it again, back to that example, $200 an hour. That that might be completely out of someone's, price range, and they would never ever do it.

Dara Ladjevardian:

But They never think about it.

Ryan Lazuka:

They never think about it. But if he caught if they subscribe for $50 a month or whatever the person's charging or $20 a month or whatever it is, you know, that's in the ballpark. So it's like you open up the whole customer base for people. Are there any, like, applications that you've seen people use your tool? I mean, you're you're very new, but have have you seen any applications, that sort of surprised you, like, on how people have used it?

Dara Ladjevardian:

I've been surprised with some of the usage on some of these clones. Like, we have one guy who's, like, an accountability coach, and he has created, like, a bunch of different memberships around his co his clone, and he's making, like, 8 k a month, which which is pretty substantial for a coach.

Ryan Lazuka:

Like, how long have you been around? Sorry to interrupt. But

Dara Ladjevardian:

We launched our product publicly in December. We we have we've had private beta users since, like, September.

Ryan Lazuka:

Okay. So it's new. It's very new, and this guy's already making 8 k a month. Just wow.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. And other people are using it as, like, a lead gen tool. You know, you connect it to Zapier. Someone talks to your clone because it's like, okay. What can I learn from this person?

Dara Ladjevardian:

And, you know, they can set it up with their whole marketing stack. Some people just use it as, like, a, hey. Get to know me. This is on my landing page. This is who I am.

Dara Ladjevardian:

I recently tried it as an and we'll see how that goes.

Ryan Lazuka:

That's amazing. Like, how did you even end up how'd you even do that? Like, through Zapier too? Or, like, how did that how does that work?

Dara Ladjevardian:

I just I just posted for the dating use case, I just posted on Twitter, and I was like, hey. I'm single. I don't have time to go on dating apps. Talk to my clone, if you wanna get to know my values and who I am.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. It's like speed dating on steroids there. Right? Like, post your clone on Twitter, Rex, and then find out, you know, if a 1,000 girls look at it and, you know, one of them has the same personality that you like, then maybe that's a a a good way to good way a new way to date. It's gonna be fun to fun to watch.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. And I think that transitions to, another use case that people are finding value in and that's the analytics. So for the dating use case, it's kinda obvious. In the analytics, I can understand, you know, who are the people that maybe I would like based on, like, what they're talking about.

Ryan Lazuka:

Mhmm.

Dara Ladjevardian:

For authors or content creators, they can see what is the content that is really resonating with my audience or, like, what are the questions that keep getting asked over and over again? And it kinda helps you plan out how you should communicate with your clients or your audience or how you should create new content in the future.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. And I think that brings up a good point. Like, so on your platform, with your clone? Like, the people that have had conversation with your clone?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. On the higher tier, right now it's fully anonymized just because, you know, some people we we wanna protect the privacy of the consumers. We're trying to find ways in which we can make it unanonymized and let the consumer know that, like, hey. If you're having these chats, the clone owner may see these chats, which some people may want. But in the case of, like, coaching, for example, or, like, therapy, some of that stuff is very personal, and people may not want that data to be shared.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Got

Ryan Lazuka:

it. Well, the good news is, like, I think it's kind of obvious that you're talking to a clone, like, if you're gonna use the tool. So

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah.

Ryan Lazuka:

It's not like someone's calling you on the phone, and it sounds like a real human, and you don't know it's a clone. So

Dara Ladjevardian:

We're not trying to trick people.

Ryan Lazuka:

So it's like privacy doesn't matter as much maybe in this case because you know that data is being shared. I don't know. That's how I would feel at least.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. So I I think we'll get to a point where we can it. Definitely.

Ryan Lazuka:

And, you know, there's a lot of magic that goes behind the scenes to make your product work. How does the or how does your tool learn about the person? Like, is it you upload just any kind of document you can, videos, like, it's it seems like you guys are just want the more data, the better. But how do you get that data to to to train, your clone the clones on?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. So right now it's it's more optimized for people who have written a lot. Like I created my clone using my Notion because I write a lot in my Notion. People can upload their blogs, their YouTube channels, their Twitter, their podcasts, Google Drive, books. We have a integration with pretty much anything.

Dara Ladjevardian:

One feature that we're working on in the next couple of weeks is interview mode, and that's where your clone will ask you questions, where there are gaps in its knowledge. So that that way

Ryan Lazuka:

Wow. That's cool.

Dara Ladjevardian:

It becomes easier for anyone to create a clone. Like, if I if I don't my mom or my dad, for example, may not write a lot, but maybe if they're asked the right questions, the clone can get better and better over time and eventually they have a clone.

Ryan Lazuka:

It could ask you questions the entire time the clone exists. Right? Like, a year from now, it might be like, well, I don't know this. I'm gonna ask.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. So it'll look into, like, its brain and, like, where it's where the gaps are, maybe some questions that it got that it couldn't answer, and it'll ask those questions.

Ryan Lazuka:

Do you have any competitors out there? And if you do, like, what's some of the differentiators between you, yourself, and other companies? And that brings up a good a better point actually is, you know, it seems like these big players like OpenAI and Microsoft and NVIDIA, like, almost they're gonna have a monopoly over this whole AI space. Is that something you fear as a business owner? Because I'm trying to start my own AI app, and that's something I think about all the time.

Ryan Lazuka:

Like, tomorrow, OpenAI can come out with some tool that just sort of obliterates my whole business model.

Dara Ladjevardian:

I think just as just in the history of startups in general, you know, maybe between 2008 and 2015 and whenever a startup started, people would be like, oh, you're competing with Facebook or Google? What if they just, like, obliterate you? And the the thing that works is just focus and care for the customer. So I think other people might say our competition is Ho or GPT store or Character AI, but the difference is we're really focused on letting people create authentic versions of themselves that they can scale. That's and that's it.

Dara Ladjevardian:

We're not trying to be, like, the all inclusive chatbot platform where you can create bots for different reasons. No. We're creating a cloning platform. And that focus is what has led us to get customers who have said, hey. We're not really happy with GPT Store or PO or Character AI.

Dara Ladjevardian:

We really like Delphi because this is how I would speak, and I can share with these other platforms and I can monetize it. So that's kinda how I think about competition. If there's anyone who's doing exactly what we're doing, I would maybe say personal AI, but I I don't think people have taken the specific approach on cloning that we have.

Ryan Lazuka:

No. We've we've interviewed a different a couple, probably 2 or 3 different companies. Not exactly what you do, but the one difference that I saw is exactly what you just said. It's like very personalized. Like, if you go on and try to sign up, and create a clone, it just it's very your your tool is very thorough.

Ryan Lazuka:

It asks you a ton of questions, and like you just said to, you know, those follow-up questions are gonna be key. Like, if it doesn't know something about you, it's gonna ask you questions and even get smarter. So, it's very cool. And you can can you use your tool for, like, customer service as well, like a chatbot on a website or even potentially answering phone calls one day?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. I mean, if if you, started creating your clone in Delphi, you'll see my chatbot is in the bottom right corner of Studio. You can ask questions. You can call him. And I actually get notified whenever you ask my clone a question that it can't answer.

Dara Ladjevardian:

So that way I can be like, okay. My clone needs to improve into these areas, and maybe I should reach out this person.

Ryan Lazuka:

And what happens if it doesn't know something? Like like, say if I'm talking to a clone of you and it doesn't know something, how does it respond usually?

Dara Ladjevardian:

We have a strictness scores and the score is, like, okay. I want the clone to try to reason on new information based on everything it's been trained on, or I want the clone to just say, like, I don't know. Sorry about that. So it really depends, there there's a full spectrum. I keep mine pretty strict, but some people like the reasoning capabilities, so we leave it option open.

Ryan Lazuka:

And I see like, another use case for this seems like, you know, influencers or celebrities that don't have time to respond to their to their fan base. You know, if Taylor Swift wants to create her own clone, she could do it on Delphi. Do you have any celebrities that you can share with us or or people that anybody would know that's used your tool? I know you're very early, so if you don't, that's cool. But, do you have any anyone that's reached out to you that, people would know?

Dara Ladjevardian:

So we haven't fully started our outreach to big name celebrities yet. We have, like, we have, like, a DJ, Sam Felt, and we have a real housewife of New York. Her name is Jill Zarin,

Ryan Lazuka:

which Awesome.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Which is funny. I I one feature I'm excited about that we're releasing this week is putting your clone in your Instagram DMs. And I think that's gonna make a lot of sense for some of these big name celebrities and influencers who just their DMs are just cluttered. And, you know, your clone can kind of manage that for you and maybe guide people towards the right place.

Ryan Lazuka:

So it will auto it can auto respond in DMs? Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. Alright. That's really cool.

Ryan Lazuka:

Like, if anybody has a decent sized Twitter account, they'll know, like, replying to people and and replying to DMs. It can take you a while. Like, every day, you know, I've got maybe close to 10,000 followers on on x, and every day before when I sort of while I'm stretching and working, before I work out, I just respond to, you know, anybody on Twitter that's that's that's reached out to me. But that can take, like, a half hour, and I only have

Dara Ladjevardian:

Take some time. Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Lazuka:

I only have 10,000 followers. It's nothing compared to, you know, Kim Kardashian or something. You know? So

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. The amount of DM she's getting.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. But if they if they can respond to people, it's gonna really increase their brand awareness too just just by doing that alone. You know? People really care about them. So that's awesome.

Ryan Lazuka:

Like, what are your main focuses on growing Delphi? Is it to reach out to, like, celebrities, or do you have one facet you're try trying to focus on right right now, like mentorship or celebrities, or is there one area that you're really looking into to grow in?

Dara Ladjevardian:

I think celebrities, I think, is a great niche on its own. As a startup, like, if we wanna start with celebrities, we'd probably have to act more like a talent agency than a startup. So I feel like celebrities is a niche that we'll tackle as we get bigger. Right now, experts and coaches and content creators and, secondarily, small business owners are the ones that are make sense for how big we are, as we, like, think about our next round of funding and growing. And, you know, from a product perspective, I told you we're planning to have video later this year.

Dara Ladjevardian:

So that's, that's top of mind.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. That'll be really awesome if you can speak with somebody and it sort of looks good enough that you can you think it's them, that'll be awesome.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. I would love that. I've been I've been onboarding customers manually myself, and, I'd love to send my clone to these onboarding calls.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. If anybody doesn't know, this Dara's, like, crazy because every single onboarding, and I I know you've changed things a little bit, but every single person that signs up, he schedules a call with and onboards them personally. So that's incredible an awesome service for somebody. So and I'm sure you're getting tired of that as well.

Dara Ladjevardian:

That's ending that's ending in 2 weeks. It was, 8 AM 8 AM to 8 PM, nonstop meetings, meetings can only go so far.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. I'm sure you're gonna have a party after that. In terms of, like, you know, more general questions, it's in AI in general, what are your thoughts? I mean, there's all these scare tactics out there that AI is gonna overtake the world and humans are doomed. What are your thoughts on AI in general, like, in those in those type of situations?

Ryan Lazuka:

Do you think that's gonna happen, or do you think it's more of gonna be a tool to really help humans, exponentially get smarter and more efficient at things?

Dara Ladjevardian:

I I'm more of an optimist for sure. Like, I understand the bear case and, you know, I would like to say all humans are good, but you definitely have bad actors. But I I think that's the real detail. I'm not scared of AI alone. I'm scared of AI in the wrong hands, which ultimately, like, being scared of the wrong people leveraging AI for the wrong reasons.

Dara Ladjevardian:

I think that's why the conversation of AI being in the hands of, like, a few companies is scary because then you're giving a lot of power to these people. But the other side of the spectrum is scary too. If it's fully open source and democratized, it's much easier that it gets in the wrong hands. So it's a very complicated debate, and I understand both sides. I haven't quite picked a side yet, but I'm definitely leaning more towards optimism and, like, you know, accelerationism.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. We can only hope. You know, it's I think Bill Gates and Sam Ullman sat down recently, and that's one thing Bill Gates said. He's like, you know, the one thing I'm scared about is AI gets in the wrong hands. Hopefully, it doesn't, but it's gonna be interesting because, you know, there's gonna be a lot of regulation out there eventually.

Ryan Lazuka:

In the US, it seems like it's all lip service at this point, but the European Union Union has already, implemented some regulations. But it it comes to the point where, like, what if 1 or 2 countries in the whole world don't regulate at all? You know, that could ruin all regulation for everybody if if everybody

Dara Ladjevardian:

That's the thing. I don't think that I don't think the whole world is going to unite on one thing. So Pandora's box is already open. And if that's the mentality we're gonna have, we gotta accept this new world and figure out how to work with it versus try to, like, prevent it from happening. It's already happening.

Ryan Lazuka:

It's already happening. It's like you can't you can't stop this train. I don't think it's it's gonna, you know, it's gonna go in the direction it wants to go. We can sort of point it where we want it to go, but it's it's it's it's on the tracks and headed down quickly. So in terms of funding, like, you mentioned you've got some backing right now.

Ryan Lazuka:

Can you go into a little bit of details about that, and what are you looking to to grow the company in the next year or 2?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. So we raised our seed around from Founders Fund, Lux Capital X Fund, and, Balaji Srinivasan. And we're hoping to raise our series a later this year. And, obviously, we wanna have, like, thousands of paying customers. We want hundreds of thousands of weekly active users on the consumer side learning from clones.

Dara Ladjevardian:

And we really wanna see like, have a narrative about, like, what are the conversations people are having with clones and are they actually getting value out of it? That's what we want. Like, we we don't allow AI girlfriends on our platform because we think that's a net negative for society. We want the clones in our platforms and not necessarily in, like, an addictive way.

Ryan Lazuka:

Got it. Well, can someone come on your site right now, say if they like, another hot thing is creating an AI influencer from Barcelona Barcelona that everybody's talking about, and and she's got, like, over 200,000 followers or something like that. Can you go on your platform, Delphi, and create a influencer based on nothing? So it's not based on you. It's not a clone, but you just wanna create an AI bot, for example, based on what you feed it, or is that possible or not?

Dara Ladjevardian:

You you technically could right now. Eventually, we're gonna be working on guardrails so that it's more like a Facebook or LinkedIn where, like, you can't just create a LinkedIn profile of a fake person. You need, like, some sort of identity verification because that that's, like, the focus we're focused on, people and augmenting people and not just creating, you know, fake characters.

Ryan Lazuka:

Gotcha. Gotcha. Because you're you're you're like, your whole business model is cloning humans, and it sort of doesn't fit that fit that model.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. It's just the focus. You know, I think with AI, it's very easy to be like, wow. There's so many opportunities. Let me try to do everything.

Dara Ladjevardian:

But that's how you actually end up not being amazing at anything.

Ryan Lazuka:

Right. Right. Your and your your website is very polished. It looks like you've got some great developers working on your on your platform. How did you you know, from your last company that you worked at, how did you get started?

Ryan Lazuka:

Like, how did you form form a team and put everything together? Because I think a lot of people out out there are interested in, you know, how business owners get started and how they create their team.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. So I was very lucky to meet my cofounder at OpenStore. We're very similar. Our values are the same. And I think when you're building a company, everything is rooted on values and the culture you wanna build.

Dara Ladjevardian:

And that is the biggest filter for hiring. You know, you may be the smartest person in the world, but you don't feel their values, you're not gonna be a good fit. And it's funny because, like, almost every person on my team that we've hired has come through Twitter. We had, you know, recruiting firms and all this stuff. None of that worked out.

Dara Ladjevardian:

It all came through Twitter. I just started posting. People who resonated with my content reached out or, like, I reached out and that's that's how they've ended up joining the company.

Ryan Lazuka:

That's very cool. And it's free and you don't have to, yeah, pay a huge commission for for, recruitment. So win win for everybody. Awesome.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. People think people think, you know, you put the energy out there, it'll come back to you. And it's Twitter is one of those platforms. It's like you can put that energy out there and you can get investors, you can get employees, maybe girlfriends with that clone post that I did. You know?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Who knows?

Ryan Lazuka:

Another great thing about your company is it sort of marks markets itself. Like, you can just say, well, you can clone yourself. That's good enough right there to get a lot of attention. So are Exactly. In terms of marketing, is there anything else that you guys are doing?

Ryan Lazuka:

You're on Twitter. What are there any kind of secrets, that you can share with audience to that that have helped you grow to this point?

Dara Ladjevardian:

I think a focus on brand and values. Like, when you stand for something, people take notice. And I think we we have we're very strict about what we stand for as a company, what we don't allow, what we do approve, and you begin to build like a evangelist, and your evangelist will spread your message for you. And the great thing about Delphi is whenever someone creates a clone, they will end up posting it on some social media, and that becomes like a self marketing growth hack.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. For sure. So how does that look? Like, say, if I wanna clone myself and and post it on Twitter, is it just it's just a link, I'd assume, or is it a video of yourself? I mean, I guess you can do it both ways, but how do you guys, promote, you know, other people's clones on Twitter?

Ryan Lazuka:

Or, you know, if I wanna promote mine, how does that work?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. You can post the clone on Twitter. We have, like, a custom embedding image that will show up when you post it on Twitter. We would like to get to the point where we can make it interactive in Twitter. I know it's possible.

Dara Ladjevardian:

We just don't know how to do it yet. Same with with Instagram. You know, some creators will post in their story, hey. AMA, ask me anything. But now they can just be like, hey.

Dara Ladjevardian:

AMA, I'm busy. Ask my clone anything. And it'll have, like, a little session.

Ryan Lazuka:

Do you even know how that would work on Twitter? Like, how would you

Dara Ladjevardian:

It would have to go through the link. It would have to go through the link, but

Ryan Lazuka:

Oh, I see.

Dara Ladjevardian:

With the update with the update we have next week with the clone being able to respond to DMs, you could just go directly to their Instagram reply to the Instagram story with a question, and the clone would respond.

Ryan Lazuka:

Got it. Got it. Very that's awesome. Very cool. What's your medium term vision?

Ryan Lazuka:

We went over, like, maybe the what the next year you're looking to do, but, is the medium term vision to do you have anything down the you know, that's very complicated to implement on your end that you're looking to do over the next 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 years?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yes. So we have we have a road map for both the supply and demand side of the product. Supply side is pretty obvious. You know, make it easier to create your clone, make it easier to share your clone, make the video better, the voice calling better. Right now, cloning is great for inbound.

Dara Ladjevardian:

So if people are coming your way, they can ask questions. We wanna make cloning also great for outbound. The clone can create content. The clone can post. The clone can reach out to people all in your voice.

Dara Ladjevardian:

So that's on the supply side. On the demand side, we'd love to create, like, a very personalized experience where you land in Delphi. You know, you talk about your life, maybe what you're trying to achieve, some goals, and it'll match you with all of the relevant people that have talked about something similar or that have done something similar. So you can kind of, discover people in a way. So that's how we're thinking about both sides of the marketplace.

Dara Ladjevardian:

And then as consumers use Delphi and learn from people, they actually end up creating the data needed to create a clone of themselves through their conversations with clones. So right now, cloning is easy for people who have a lot of content. We hope in the future, it's easy for everyone.

Ryan Lazuka:

Sometimes it's hard to wrap my head around all this because there's so much novel and new new technology out there that is really gonna change our world, in a way that we can't even foresee yet. One of the one of the cool things that I think is really gonna start to take off maybe the next 5 years or so is, like, AI robots. Like, Tesla has the Optimus 2 robot they're that they're working on, and and it's something that you could buy for I think they're selling it for, like they're going to sell it for around $20,000 when it's available. And it could come and clean your house and, you know, do chores for you, things like that. But that's one thing that maybe, you know, you can't this is way down the road, but you could clone yourself and put it in a physical form one day.

Ryan Lazuka:

What do you think about that? Like, your physical clone as a robot.

Dara Ladjevardian:

I I've thought about it. I don't know if the use case makes sense for a lot of our customers. Maybe if, like, you're a professor and you wanna teach in multiple classrooms physically, that makes sense. Maybe if you're an athlete or, like, if you're in a profession that it requires physical presence, then it's fine. But, like, I don't know why I would want a physical plot of myself.

Dara Ladjevardian:

That I think that would just freak me out.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. I I think it like, this topic always comes up for our podcast, and it's like, are we gonna get to the point where we wanna talk not to a human being, but we wanna talk to AI instead? Because our AI friend is never gonna talk back to us. We're never gonna get in fights with the AI friend. They're always gonna know everything about us.

Ryan Lazuka:

They're gonna understand us perfectly. So do you think that eventually you hate that? Yeah.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Well, I think, think about, like, how this generation the younger generation is obsessed with TikTok. It's just like immediate dopamine rush. They'd rather watch TikTok than go outside or like, you know, read a book. They'd rather do the easy thing than the hard thing. So just in a dystopian way, it seems very likely given that human nature likes easy things with high dopamine that they will tend to want to talk to AI friends that do not give them hard times even though that's worse for their professional and personal development.

Ryan Lazuka:

Oh, 100%. It seems like that's gonna happen whether we want it to or not, just like, you know, social media has taken over our lives and people are on their phones all the time. It's not a good thing. So maybe we're just we're just gonna head down that path where, like, your friends are AI bots. I mean, I hope it doesn't get there.

Ryan Lazuka:

Like, one of the things that it would be terrible is, you know, if you have a friend that agrees with all you you all the time, it's not part of you like, your human nature. You need to be challenged. Right? You need to be challenged by

Dara Ladjevardian:

challenged like we need. Yeah.

Ryan Lazuka:

Need to be challenged by your wife, your friends, and it sort of makes your relationship stronger in the long term.

Dara Ladjevardian:

100%.

Ryan Lazuka:

It's gonna be really, wild to see how all this plays out. And back to Delphi in terms of because I forgot to ask you this. In terms of pricing, you mentioned it's subscription based. Right? Like, it can the person that creates the clone, charge anything they want, or is it directed by you guys?

Dara Ladjevardian:

So we have a free tier for people who wanna create a clone, and then there's 3 price tiers where they pay monthly depending on usage and features. And then if they wanna monetize their clone, they can set the price. They can set the number of messages they wanna allow per month, the number of minutes for calling, whether to allow texting or Telegram. We're we're gonna be adding Slack as well. I think Slack is really interesting because there's there's, like, a lot of coaches who who coach executives in con in companies, and you can imagine them also upselling with their clone for employees to have sessions with in, like, the Slack channel.

Dara Ladjevardian:

So I think that could be something interesting that we're exploring. But, yeah, that's how you monetize.

Ryan Lazuka:

Okay. And, obviously, it's working because that one guy's making a lot of money so far. Yeah. That one use case. And didn't you say that guy, he's really not, like, even a big influencer?

Ryan Lazuka:

He's sort of just,

Dara Ladjevardian:

has super followers. He's just not a big influencer, but he has that's the thing. He has people who trust him.

Ryan Lazuka:

Mhmm.

Dara Ladjevardian:

And if you have an audience and people trust you for certain information, then they wanna ask you questions. People already tried to do that. Like you said, they tried to DM you on Twitter. They're already in the motion of trying to do this thing, and this product is just kind of like a layer to handle that inbound.

Ryan Lazuka:

Sure. And, like, do you envision, like, how this is gonna go? Like, say if it does take off and everybody starts to their own clone of themselves, is there kind is there any, like, unforeseen things that are gonna happen because of that if if if we get to that point that that you've thought about?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Well, I think there's a whole issue of privacy we need to figure out. Like, if you wanna train your clone on text or WhatsApp to so that it knows more about, like, how you think about things, there's a risk of that data being, you know, available to anyone who talks to your clone. So that's one thing. It's a problem we real it's it's a problem we need to solve. How can you train a clone to make it better on data without exposing that data?

Dara Ladjevardian:

But something I'm really excited about in, like, the long distance feature of Delphi is simulating conversations. And what I mean by that is if everyone has a clone, you could have, like, Delphi recruiting where you send your clone and talk to a 1000000 candidates, and your clone tells you, hey, like, these are the people that would be great for your company. Or you can do Delphi dating, where you have your clone talk to a 1000000 other clones and says, hey. These are the people that you might get along with. So I think there's a lot of interesting things you can do with simulation of, like, activities.

Ryan Lazuka:

Now now if it if we do get to that point where there's you know, you've got a 1,000 clones talking to, you know, thousands of different people, Is there a point where the clones will talk to each other and then give you feedback, like, on whatever you need?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, clone, I want you to talk to, Marcus Aurelius, for example. I'm like, have a conversation about this subject and tell me what you guys found out.

Ryan Lazuka:

Wow. And that's something that can is that something you can do right now? Or

Dara Ladjevardian:

You probably could do right now, but it's not easy to do right now. Like, we haven't productized it yet.

Ryan Lazuka:

Like, you can pretty much do anything with Delphi as long as the product has an API I can talk to. Is that true?

Dara Ladjevardian:

You mean in terms of actions or, like, letting the clones do more than just?

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. Like, say like you said, you know, you can DM somebody on Instagram, right, with Delphi?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Right. Yeah.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. So as long as, like, the the product you're trying to integrate with has an API, then you should be able to integrate Delphi with that if there's, yeah, if there's a demand for it.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Exactly. Yeah.

Ryan Lazuka:

And even if there's not, someone could probably integrate it themselves via Zapier or something some product like that, I'd imagine.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. Yeah. We for, like, for Telegram, for example, like, we'll have the customer create a bot and they just put in their API key. That way we don't have to handle it all in house.

Ryan Lazuka:

Can you go into the back end tech that, you know, I know a lot of companies have their own secret sauce, but you go into the tech that you're using to create these in the first place. Like, are you using what what kind of LMs are you using? What kind of code are you using? Things like that.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. So we're we're a multi model architecture. We use Mistral, OpenAI, Claude. And the in trying to recreate how a human mind works, how you store and retrieve and, like, manage the data is actually more almost more important than the model because, you're trying to replicate how the brain works. So when you talk to me, I am kind of interpreting what you're what you're trying to figure out what your intention is, trying to figure out what's relevant, trying to think about our past relationship history, and I'm planning ahead for our conversation in a few steps.

Dara Ladjevardian:

So that all comes into play in my final response. And those are all, like, different models. That's kinda how the brain works. We have a bunch of different pattern recognition areas in our brain that kinda takes different parts of a conversation and relays them as we speak. I take a lot of inspiration from Raikur as well.

Dara Ladjevardian:

He wrote a book about called How to Create a Mind, which is kinda what we're trying to do.

Ryan Lazuka:

Good book to read.

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah.

Ryan Lazuka:

So do you route the like, depending on what the person asks or what the person's saying, do you route that to a different LLM, or or, like, depending on what they're saying is really

Dara Ladjevardian:

Depending on their intention. Yeah. Sometimes. And it's not the LM is really good. It's just that we have different models for different things, and sometimes we redirect them based on the attention.

Ryan Lazuka:

Is there anything else that that you wanna let everybody know about, about your product that maybe, you know, people don't think about with a voice with a cloning tool? I mean, that's new in and of itself. But is there anything else that, you know, you can share?

Dara Ladjevardian:

On the consumer side, I use Delphi almost every day. Like, I I will call Keith or, like, someone who's relevant. We have this feature called quick ask, which is kinda like what I described where you can ask a question and it'll show all the relevant people that you can talk to. And I I recommend trying out the calling feature, and I'm I'm obviously biased, but I I use it pretty often. It's pretty useful when you want, like, tactical advice.

Ryan Lazuka:

So, like, who do you use that every day, but, like, how do you use it specifically?

Dara Ladjevardian:

Like, maybe you have a situation. I wanna talk through a specific circumstance. And there are people who maybe have achieved something that I want to achieve. And so talking to them kind of helps. And the more I use Delphi, the more the Delphi platform knows about me.

Dara Ladjevardian:

So those conversations start with, okay, Daragh, the CEO of Delphi. I already have this context, so I don't need to, like, fill it in on what it doesn't know already.

Ryan Lazuka:

Awesome. And then you're saying on the the consumer side and the other the the other side, there's something as well? The

Dara Ladjevardian:

Yeah. Yeah. The clone side. So if if you're interest if you're interested in creating a clone, we have this readiness score that shows you how good how accurate your clone is in representing you. And so when you create your clone, you wanna get that score to, like, 70%, and then it's usually pretty good.

Dara Ladjevardian:

And you can always add more, the more the better. But if you want your audience to use your clone, we've seen best practices as, like, putting it in your Twitter bio, your Instagram bio, marketing it not as a, hey, talk to an AI version of me, but, hey, imagine if you could have 247 access to my knowledge or my content and it's personalized to you. So I think when you're when you're talking about products in general, you should never focus it on the technology because that's gonna get short term interest, but not long term enduring, you know, retention. You should talk about the value that it's gonna give to people, and that's what we've seen do the best for the clones that are doing well.

Ryan Lazuka:

Yeah. The I you know, there's so many, like, you know, I follow a bunch of people on YouTube for finance or for web development, things like that. So that'd be a good use case because in those use cases, those people know something very specific through their experience over the years that nobody else knows, and you could ask them questions on Delphi if the you know, if they have an account and it will, you know, you don't have to call them or pay them or anything. I mean, not pay them, like, $200 an hour. You just pay the subscription fee.

Ryan Lazuka:

So, yeah, very, very, very awesome. Is there anything else you want to promote right now? Feel free to do it, Dara.

Dara Ladjevardian:

No. I think we have our product. If you're interested in cloning yourself, let me know. You can do it on our website. I respond very quickly to my email, so if you have any questions, my email is dara@delphi.ai.

Ryan Lazuka:

Everyone out there, please subscribe to our email newsletter. It's fryhyphenai.comforward/subscribe. We write interesting news stories every every day about AI, and then on Sunday, we will write a long form article on Delphi as well. That should be out in probably 2 to 3 weeks. Well, thanks so much for joining us.

Ryan Lazuka:

We really appreciate it.