The Metaverse stands to augment human self-expression. There are no laws of physics there, and in theory, we can be whatever we want to be. Biases that remain unfortunately prevalent in the physical world – like ageism, sexism, and racism – will be rendered obsolete. And the notion of “AI” will quickly evolve from futuristic fantasy to a fabric of our daily lives.
Lauren Kunze and Liz Snower envision a future in which AI-driven avatars can hang out and keep us company throughout the day. They see “humanlike AI” as the final evolutionary stage of computing: Historically, humans have had to adapt to speak the language of computers, from the command line to the keyboard. But humanlike AI will change that, enabling us to interact with computers like we interact with fellow humans – in our own natural, spoken languages. This is the impetus behind the company they co-founded, called ICONIQ AI, which is building what they call “a humanlike AI operating system for the Metaverse.”
With ICONIQ AI, these women are bringing to reality a new kind of artificial intelligence, which has a face and a body along with a brain and a voice, and is designed to interact with and entertain humans, both in virtual worlds and on the traditional web. That’s the vision for Kuki, ICONIQ’s flagship AI, which can talk about virtually anything–and has already exchanged over a billion messages with more than 25 million people.
ICONIQ AI enables developers and brands to tap Kuki’s AI “brain” and procedural animation stack (which allows her to move, emote and lip-sync) to power their own avatars and conversational AI applications. And soon, they will allow developers to contribute modules to the Kuki core brain, similar to how people contribute to Wikipedia.
A native of San Francisco’s Bay Area, Lauren hails from a long line of mathematicians and technologists, and learned to code from a very young age. As a teen, her father – a pioneer in AI – encouraged her to create a chatbot “smart enough to win a beauty pageant.”
After graduating from Harvard, she began tinkering with the chatbot codebase she’d built as a hobbyist of sorts, commercializing it to form Pandorabots – which would grow to become one of the world’s largest developer platforms for chatbots, as well as the incubator for ICONIQ AI’s Kuki.
Liz Snower found her calling in conversational AI in 2015 when she was hired as the first employee at Canadian-based Kik Messenger’s Los Angeles office and tasked with channeling her experience as a digital marketer and content expert to design engagement-oriented chatbots for a handful of major consumer brands. That spawned the launch of her own voice and messaging chatbot company, CONVRG, which was later acquired in 2019.
The duo first met when Kuki debuted on Kik Messenger, quickly becoming one of the most popular chatbot’s among the platform’s largely teen user base. They bonded further as part of a small Women in Bots and AI group, staying in touch over the years, and in 2020, when avatar technology had begun advancing rapidly, they joined forces, setting out to realize Kuki’s full potential as an autonomous embodied AI.
Lauren and Liz are excited about a future in which more underrepresented innovators make headways in tech and hard sciences. To that end, they are building a diverse team intent on shaping AI that eschews bias and toxicity, and is “representative beyond the tired trope of subservient, female-gendered AI assistants like Siri or Alexa, which are built by predominantly white, male-run tech giants,” Lauren explained.
“We’d love to be considered the Wikipedia for conversational AI with a huge community behind it, with web3 infrastructure to record and reward developer contributions,” Lauren continued. “In the future, we will allow developers to contribute modules to the Kuki core brain in this way, because we feel strongly that AI simulating interpersonal relationships of any kind ought to be democratized and controlled by the people.”
Lauren and Liz hope everyone in the connected world will benefit from their AI. “If we’re correct about the inevitability of people having AI friends, then almost all of us with online access will be affected by it, even demographics you might not expect,” Liz posited. “And when AI/human relationships are common, AI will no doubt impact and influence humans in at least some of the ways our fellow humans do. This could be a wonderful phenomenon or a bleak one. It really depends on the ethics with which this kind of AI is developed and commercialized.”
LAUREN KUNZE AND LIZ SNOWER’S WEB3 TIPS
Follow consumer behavior to understand where your brand needs to invest, and let daily active user counts – rather than industry hype – be your guide. Established games and virtual worlds like Roblox, Fortnite, and to some extent VRChat and even Second Life, are great places to test new technologies like a Virtual AI Brand Ambassador, which can also be deployed on traditional channels.
