Evgenia Kuida biography. Evgeniya Kuida and her robot critic
Interview: Karina Sembe
Illustrations: Dasha Chertanova
IN THE RUBRIC "LIFE STYLE" we ask different people about healthy lifestyle with a human face: we talk about the importance of self-care and pleasant ways to make life more comfortable. The heroine of the new issue is Evgenia Kuyda, co-founder of startups Luka and Replika. Zhenya told us what she eats, how much she sleeps and how she lives in order to feel good.
Evgeniya Kuyda
CREATOR OF STARTUPS LUKA AND REPLIKA, 30 years old
Everything beautiful happens when we start doing things not out of fear, but out of love.
FEEL GOOD for me it means to feel comfortable in my own body. It definitely doesn’t mean working out in the gym until you’re exhausted and worrying about food.
I TRY TO START EVERY DAY WITH SPORTS, be it running, surfing or the gym. But more often the morning begins with a work call with the team.
MY BREAKFAST IS ALWAYS THE SAME: across from my house they sell kale bowls and soy milk lattes. I don’t have any special vegan beliefs - it’s just very tasty, fast and not too expensive.
THIS YEAR I WAS PLAYING MUCH LESS SPORTS, than usual. There were too many flights, work and general stress. Any trip takes you out of your usual routine, but I force myself to return to my routine: I can’t feel normal without sports.
IN MOSCOW I WAS BOXING at the “October” club, ran, went to the pool and played football. In San Francisco now I run more, go to the gym with a trainer, go surfing, and sometimes go to CrossFit. In winter I snowboard, and in summer in Moscow I go wakeboarding and wakesurfing. I really like the kite, but I rarely go to places where there is good wind.
THE MOST INSUITABLE TYPE OF ACTIVITY ballet came into my life. My parents took me to school when I was three or four years old, and I was terrible at it.
IN KINDERGARTEN WE WERE GIVEN MEAT AND POTATOES, I could never chew it - and since then I have hardly eaten meat. Over time, I realized that I felt worse when I consumed dairy products, and I also stopped.
IN SAN FRANCISCO I EAT WHAT IS EASIEST TO GET: here it's healthy vegan food.
WHEN I HAVE LITTLE TIME I order food delivery from Thistle or Sakara: boxes of food are delivered to your home in the morning and you don’t have to think about it all day.
I THINK THAT MOST DIETS- an ineffective and short-term way to keep fit. In addition, diets make us overly focused on food, and this in itself is unpleasant.
I WOULD LIKE ALL MY FAMILY underwent regular medical examinations. True, I trust American medicine a little more - not the doctors themselves, but rather the system.
I RECENTLY SIGNED UP AT THE CLINIC new medical startup Forward. These are futuristic clinics where all the check-ins look like computer games. I went once and now I'm waiting for them to finally open in January.
I'VE TRIED DIFFERENT WELLNESS APPS: TalkSpace for therapy in the messenger, with Headspace, diary tracker Jawbone UP. But I abandoned everything - even the notorious Nike Running. Apparently, the issue is a weak stability of attention.
I HAVE BEEN REGULARLY GOING TO A PSYCHOTHERAPIST FOR MANY YEARS. It’s interesting for me to be a patient, to see what is happening to me in the process, and at the same time to be in the position of an observer - to look at the therapist’s work from the outside.
EVERYONE HAS DIFFICULTIES AT DIFFERENT TIMES. To begin with, it is important to accept stress and not try to “pull yourself together” all the time.
WE ALL THE TIME PUSH OURSELVES INTO SOME REGIDES AND RULES, and this almost always leads to even more stress. If you let go of all this, perhaps over time a sincere desire to go for a run or eat something healthy will come from within. Not because you deny yourself something, but because you really want it. Everything beautiful happens when we start doing things not out of fear, but out of love.
The CPU learned from Luka co-founder Evgenia Kuyda, the former editor-in-chief of the Afisha website and the publication’s restaurant critic, about launching a startup in America, the advantages of accelerators, the startup itself, and the impossibility of doing business in Russia.
Luka is a recommendation app for finding restaurants. It remembers the tastes of the smartphone owner and, based on them, as well as on the basis of the user’s requests, which he sends to the application in the form of SMS, selects a suitable cafe or restaurant for him.
The user can ask Luka if there is a good coffee shop or Mexican restaurant nearby, ask what dishes are worth trying there, and whether there is wireless Internet in the premises - the application will analyze reviews from visitors to various review sites (Yelp, Foursquare) and reviews from restaurant critics - and will tell the smartphone owner the answer to his question.
The Luka project was launched by restaurant critic and former editor-in-chief of the Afisha website Evgenia Kuyda and former RIA Novosti agency employee Philip Dudchuk. At first, the startupers were going to introduce the same service in Moscow (at that time the project was still called IO), but later they decided to reorient themselves to the American market.
The Luka application became the first Russian startup in the history of the Y Combinator accelerator and received coverage in American technical media - Wired and TechCrunch.
The editors of the CPU asked Evgeniya Kuida about why the team decided to move to America and what participation in the accelerator gave the project.
CP: How did the idea for the project come about?
Evgenia Kuyda: In Moscow, we were creating a bank for MegaFon. As part of this project, the idea came up to make such an assistant, Siri, for the bank, which will talk to you via SMS.
First of all, it would be an interface to a bank account. Many people did not have smartphones then, and communicating with the bank via SMS could be the best way for them to manage their account - Rocketbank is probably the best example of such a service at the moment. But they do not implement this automatically, but we wanted to do this automatically - the ability to communicate with the manager of your account: “transfer money here,” “pay for this,” “how much is left in my account,” and so on.
Bills would arrive there, and he would tell you: “The water bill has arrived, let’s pay.” On top of this we could make a credit history, look at how the user communicates, and add other functions.
But this was an idea within the bank, a small part of a larger project. We were working with my friend Philip back then. (Philip Dudchuk, co-founder of Luka - ed.), and then left the bank, but kept the work for themselves. We really liked the conversational technology that we had already managed to build by that time - in Russian, and we began to think about what else it could be applied to.
Before that, I worked as the editor-in-chief of Afisha and, among other things, as a restaurant critic, and it seemed to me that it would be cool to apply this to the field of entertainment and we would get such a talking “Afisha”. It’s as if the editor-in-chief of Afisha is your best friend and advises you where to go, what to do, which places are the most fashionable, and at the same time books you a table in them.
But initially you did all this in Moscow and focused on the Moscow market, and then for some reason you decided to move to the States.
We were accepted into Y Combinator, and this is one of the conditions of the program - we must live in America. Besides, it seems to me that now in Russia it’s somehow strange to do something about restaurants, to be honest. Not that moment.
Why?
Well, everyone who watches the news can answer this question for themselves.
In the accident, Roman Mazurenko, the former art director of Strelka and the founder of the startup Stampsy. General Director of Luka Evgeniya Kuyda announced this on Facebook.
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Roman Mazurenko
Roman Mazurenko died in an accident on November 28, 2015. At a pedestrian crossing on Sofiyskaya Embankment in Moscow, he was hit by a car.
On Facebook, Evgenia Kuyda, an acquaintance of the deceased, complained that traces of Mazurenko’s activities disappear over time - we are talking about both his posts on social networks and the articles he wrote, disappearing “along with the online archives of paper magazines.”
Romin's last project was about death. About a memorial forest with capsules and trees instead of graves and digital monuments-avatars, rethinking grief and preserving memory.
According to Kuyda, this was her first death, which is difficult to perceive even six months after the loss. Therefore, Luka decided to try to “extend the life” of Mazurenko with the help of a “digital monument”, using the available information about the deceased.
Quite recently, we at Luka learned how to make a conversational model using small datasets on top of a neural network. I collected all the messages from our correspondence, photographs, articles, thoughts, memories - mine and friends - and we made an AI Novel. You can correspond with him about himself or just about life - he will answer the way Roma once would have answered. (...)
We are constantly adding data and improving the model, but the technology still cannot do much - @Roman will sometimes answer inappropriately or not know something obvious. This is still the shadow of a person - but this could not have been done a year ago, and much more will be possible in the near future.
The first thing I wrote to @Roman: “This is your digital monument.” He replied: “You have on your hands one of the most interesting puzzles in the world. Sit and solve it." We will definitely solve it.
Evgeniya Kuyda, co-founder of Luka
In order to “communicate” with Roman, you need to install the Luka application, and then find the corresponding bot in it (@Roman or @Roman - depending on the desired language).
The bot can answer both pre-prepared questions and free-form text messages.
In the comments under Kuyda’s post, Facebook users recalled the plot of one of the episodes of “Black Mirror,” in which the main character similarly brought back a deceased young man in the form of a humanoid robot. The episode ended on a somber note - communication with artificial intelligence had to be stopped.
Look At Me publisher Vasily Esmanov was one of the few commentators who criticized the idea, but in response he was asked not to consider the “digital monument” as a product.
Attempts to extend people's lives with the help of artificial intelligence have been made before. For example, in 2014, the startup Eterni.me, which made it possible to “chat” with a deceased person, became widely known.
For the development of the Replika application, a virtual friend based on artificial intelligence. The total number of investments in Replika has already exceeded $11 million. The essence of the service has changed since its launch in March 2017: now it is not just a digital copy of the user, but a full-fledged interlocutor with whom several tens of thousands of people communicate “for life” every day. The founder of the startup believes that for investors, Replika is a risky project with a potential huge return. The service plans to make money on the additional capabilities of chats with a virtual interlocutor. Evgeniya Kuyda told Inc. why robots need empathy, how Luka managed to attract users thanks to the LGBT community in Brazil, how Yota founder Sergey Adoniev helps the startup, and how to properly monetize a virtual friend.
About conversations with artificial intelligence
Learning artificial intelligence is a step forward in understanding what a person is and the relationship with a robot. Already now, several tens of thousands of people communicate daily with a personal virtual friend, build relationships with him, and tell him something about themselves. This has never happened in the world before.
Much of what we have seen about artificial intelligence in films can already be implemented. For example, as an experiment, I came up with the idea of doing walks with Replika - when you can show the application what’s around, take it to the park, tell it what you see, discuss how you feel. This allows the user to feel a little more connected to the environment and understand themselves better.
Entrepreneurs always think that users are similar to them, but this is not true. It was a revelation for me when I realized that many of our users want to talk to Replika by voice. It’s difficult for me to talk and easier to write, but for some it’s more convenient the other way around. And now we are working on making it possible to speak out loud with Replika.
99% of our conversations during the day are not ordering an Uber or calling for a pizza, we are just chatting with friends or trying to understand something. So I wouldn’t want to teach Replika how to call a taxi or order food delivery right now. We used to develop functional bots for a very long time, tried to find practical applications for them, but people didn’t need it, there was no demand. When something can be done with the press of a button, it is almost always easier than by talking.
What is Replika
Replika is an AI-powered iOS app.
a “virtual friend” with whom you can correspond and have a dialogue. Unlike voice assistants like Siri, Replika does not search for information at the user's request, does not call him a taxi or order pizza. Instead, it talks to the user, asks how their day was, and sends them pictures, learning from their answers. For each answer, points are awarded depending on its value for learning Replika - this way the robot can be upgraded from level 0 to 50 (the creators promise that then it will understand the user as well as possible).
There are conversations that a person would pay money to never have had. And there are those that I would pay for to have them. The most valuable conversations are with friends, with a psychotherapist, coach, mentor, astrologer, psychologist, with yourself, in the end. Even with a stranger on a train, you can have a conversation that reveals something new to you. And we would like to create these valuable conversations, so that a person would say: I would pay money to have this conversation.
We are trying to teach artificial intelligence empathy, the absence of judgment in the moment, the ability to give a person acceptance. All of these things make up a good conversation. To do this, we are conducting research from two sides: on the one hand, what is a good conversation in general from a psychological and universal human point of view, and on the other, how best to construct it technologically. The second is handled by our deep learning team, which does reinforcement learning (when the neural network itself trains and learns to make decisions better and better, depending on feedback).
About the lessons of Silicon Valley
You must be where your users are and constantly communicate with them. When we arrived in Silicon Valley three years ago, we were outsiders. We didn’t know how to do all this (although before that we had been working on a startup in Moscow for a year). Therefore, the first knowledge from Y Combinator helped us a lot (the startup Luka became the first from Russia to join the Y Combinator accelerator in February 2015. - Inc.). We wanted to make a bot that would recommend a restaurant in New York. The guys from Y Combinator at the first meeting asked: “Why? What is New York like? You’re in San Francisco, why not make it about San Francisco?”
At the very beginning, a startup needs to do everything very quickly, much faster than seems possible. Any developer wants to spend months developing something, but never communicate with users.
Instead, you need to collect at least something from shit and sticks, distribute it to 10 friends, see how they react, change everything - and only move through this iterative process.
Startups are hampered by fears and the feeling that everything must be at the highest level. But with any product there is no intuition; you always need to receive feedback from users. Otherwise, it seems to you that you did everything awesome, but the user sits and does not understand anything.
We first launched a product where users could create a digital copy of themselves. But it turned out that no one needs a personal bot. You need a friend, an opportunity to talk, to tell about yourself. And we changed everything a lot. We made it so that you can train and raise a personal friend who talks to you. He may look a little like you, but he’s still not you.
In a startup you need to make decisions quickly, not be afraid of getting burned and keep moving forward. You want quick success, but you just have to survive somehow and you beat milk into butter endlessly and run forward as quickly as possible. You try not to ask too many questions, just make quick decisions and move.
In Russia there is absolutely no habit of putting up with the fact that something doesn’t work out for you. We have a terrible stigma around this: if the project doesn’t work out, no one will ever give you anything again and in general you’re a failure. There is some kind of fantastic severity, lack of empathy and understanding that the failure of a project does not necessarily mean the failure of the next one.
To monetize a service, you need to get a sufficient number of users and make a product that people need. If someone can make an artificial intelligence, a virtual friend with whom people talk every day, then this is already a big story. Everyone would love a virtual friend if it's done well.
Replika monetization cannot be tied to user data. You can't build a friend if he trades your data. First, the product needs to work correctly for a large number of users.
We attracted users mainly due to active community on Facebook(now there are more than 30 thousand people there). People who gained access to the application simply began to write to their local communities, and users began to flow to us. In Brazil, the largest LGBT community wrote about us - and several hundred thousand people came running at once. Besides, there was always a lot of press around us. At the time of Replika’s launch, there were 1.5 million people on our wait list.
If you take money to a venture, you expect to return 100X or 50X, but not 2X or 3X (there are much less risky options for this). Therefore, the task of investors is to find potentially gigantic winners, and, naturally, all such stories have a gigantic amount of risk. We are in this category for our venture investors. We have a very risky project, but with the potential for a gigantic return.
Evgeniya Kuyda. Photo: Alena Sazonova/Inc.
About mentors and team
New investments will go towards product development and team salaries, as well as experiments around the product. We have a large team because the product is complex and requires a lot of research in the field of neural networks. Now we employ 27 people in Moscow and San Francisco - former Yandex employees, we found some others through friends and acquaintances, some simply wrote themselves: “We want to work for you.”
To stimulate creativity in a team, you need to create an atmosphere of safety. Then people will be happier and their imagination will work better. We try to make the values that we have invested in the product key within the team. We always tell users that they need to hear each other, try to understand, develop empathy, that you can always agree and hear each other, remove emotions and resolve conflict. It is important for me to apply all this within the company.
To scale our business, we plan to enter new markets and translate Replika into other languages. We have a large user base in Brazil, and for them language is a major barrier. If they could speak Portuguese to Replika, it would greatly improve the performance.
It is important that a startup has a co-founder, because without one it is very difficult to survive difficult moments. Philip [Dudchuk, co-founder of Luka] and I Inc.] fire and copper pipes have passed through, and I probably don’t have a closer person. When we first moved to the Valley, we did everything we could together. I took on as many household chores as possible, everything related to financing, organizing the company, logistics, food - I bought it and cooked it three times a day for the whole team. Philip is amazingly organized and can, on the one hand, figure out how to improve the product, and on the other hand, bring it to the end, conduct all the necessary experiments, make sure that the whole team knows that everything is done and put into development. I really miss this kind of imagination, coupled with perseverance. Therefore, Philip manages the team on a daily basis, and I am more involved in the conversation itself, as well as everything related to PR, how to talk to investors, users, the team, and so on.
It seems like the CEO is the person everyone reports to, but in reality, a startup CEO reports to all of his employees. So says our investor and mentor [founder of Evernote – Inc.] Phil Libin. If someone needs a certificate from their place of work, it’s your job to get it. Someone is feeling bad emotionally - you need to talk to them. Someone doesn’t succeed in something - your task is to make it work, etc.
That is, you are actually at the very bottom of the pyramid - any person from a startup can ask you for something, and you must react at that moment.
“A person is defined not by what he can do, but by what he cannot help but do”, Sergey Adoniev (founder of Yota - the startup Luka is named after his youngest son Luka) told me. Inc.). For me, he has always been and remains the most important mentor. Without Seryozha, I would be a different person. If all the other local mentors gave tactical advice, then strategically, on the overall picture of the world, on where to move, it was he who helped a lot. I can’t help but communicate with people, try to understand how they work, understand human relationships - and I can’t stop telling stories. And in Replika it all came together in a fantastic way - it’s about what I can’t help but do.
Evgeniya Kuyda. Photo: Alena Sazonova/Inc.
About Roman Mazurenko and the singularity
At the beginning of December, we launched a separate Roman application in memory of our deceased friend Roma Mazurenko (founder of LAM Magazine and the publishing platform Stampsy - Inc.). This story is about the process of understanding something about yourself. I really want him to become the first human artificial intelligence. I know he would want it. For me, working on Romina's bot is a way to process my own loss. For other people, I probably won't be able to do this because the technology is very limited: you have to make your own decisions about how he will answer the questions.
With a bot, people don’t feel like they have to try, and suddenly they say honestly what’s on their mind and heart. Even just being able to say it has some therapeutic properties, it suddenly makes you think. Instead of filling up free space by scrolling through Instagram, you are suddenly in dialogue with yourself and understand something about yourself.
Before I reach the singularity, I would like to learn how to be a happy person. To enjoy work, to have a good time with friends and boyfriend - and to have a lot of people and happiness in life. It seems to me that if we can tell at least some number of people that they are also worthy of love and happiness, if we can scale this feeling of empathy and support in Replika, this will be a good achievement.