Personalizing AI Technology with Kristie Kaiser and Sharon Zhang of Human AI

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All right, and welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom. I'm really excited to meet the co founders of Human AI Sharon Zhang, co founder and cto, and Christy Kaiser, co founder and head of design. Thanks, guys for being on.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us, Neil.

Absolutely. We're really excited to see you guys come out of stealth mode, I think it feels like, and now be out there. Wow, what a technology that we're really excited about. A lot of images come to mind for what you guys are building. Some from Harry Potter with the wand pulling it away from the head, others with a little hard drive or thumb drive coming out. So why don't you guys give us a quick overview of what Human AI is doing?

Yeah, definitely. I love the visual of the memory coming out into the pensieve. That's really awesome. And at a high level, what we're doing at human AI is we want to empower all humans with the benefit of an equitable and unbiased AI. And we want an AI that is built from individual experiences, that is private to the individual alone and secured with the best technologies available. Our ultimate goal is to benefit individual human lives by retaining memories so they can be effortlessly recalled when they're needed. So at a high level, we are creating your own personal AI modeled from your memory stack to create an AI that is authentic to you and you alone. And then to do that, we have these, like, three guiding brand principles that I think are important to share with people so they can have an understanding of why we're doing what we're doing and how we're doing it. And the first principle is we want to bring AI to the individual, which is why we're called human AI. I think a lot of people can relate to the fact that There are many AI companies out there in the B2B space for professionals or enterprise solutions. And we're really passionate about bringing this technology to everyday individuals because we think it can really enrich people's lives. The second brand principle is recall, not search. So what that means is we want to create this user experience that is natural to how humans remember and not like a search experience where I have to type in a specific phrase and then go through results or dig through a notebook and search for information. It's kind of served up to me authentically in the moment. And the last one is, you are not the product. So we're not an ad business. We're not selling data. We're not advertising to you. We want to make sure we build privacy and end to end so the users really control their data and we can establish that brand of trust with our users.

Oh, this is fascinating. Congrats, guys, on starting this. I'm excited to be one of the first users when it's ready. Got to be bringing a lot of expertise together around the table to make this happen. Do you guys want to give your backgrounds of expertise? Maybe, Sharon, you want to go first?

Yeah, sure. I'm Sharon. Of course. Most of my career has been AI and NLP, so I've been spending probably the last 13 to 15 years doing academia as well as the industry, AI applications. So there's really two things I'm super passionate about. One is humans, and one is AI. So you can see where that leads. So I was a major in biology as well as electrical engineering, computer science back in college and I really wanted to do something with cool technology that impacts the lives of people. So I'd done that in a few healthcare companies doing everything from speech recognition for doctor dictations to predicting heart diseases for patients. I also done a few of fintech as well as employee engagement to help people being happier at work. Right. So for human AI, I really want to do something that touch the life of every single individual like Christy was referring to. And that includes, you know, my parents, my grandparents, other people's parents, other people's grandparents. And the moment was really real for me when my dad signed up for our platform. Why I saw that in the morning. Or just kind of amazing feeling that I'm really creating something, we're really creating something here that really can benefit each individual person. Right. That's kind of my background and why I'm here at humanea.

Christy, how about your background?

Yeah, I actually went to school at San Diego State, so I moved down to the area for college. I majored in graphic design, fell in love with the area, made some really great connections that got me into kind of the startup tech scene early on. So like Sharon, I've worked in many startups. This is actually my fourth startup that I've been a part of and really kind of felt my calling when the first startup I was a part of where we were developing mobile apps for patients in clinical trials. So we were making that process more seamless and efficient with patient enrollment and recruitment and just kind of doing design that was impacting people's lives was really exciting for me. So I wanted to continue on that journey with the different startups that I've worked at. Most recently was Aira, which is our founder Suman's previous company. So I led the design team at Aira, which basically was a product for the blind and low vision community that connected them to remote sighted assistants who had this AR powered dashboard who could provide them visual information on demand and really designing impactful experiences for different people. So when Suman had this idea to build a product for memory retention and recall, that touched me personally because my grandfather had suffered from dementia. He has since passed away, but he lived with that for about 20 years. So I kind of saw firsthand the benefit, like the degradation of memory slowly over the years and how that can really impact people's lives. I mean, at the end, you know, at the end of his life, he couldn't even remember when I was talking to him, who I was. But he knew he had a granddaughter so that the concepts that he held onto were really interesting. But then the details of those memories faded. So this is a problem that's very personal to me and I think I see the potential in the long run of what this product can do and how it can be life changing.

Absolutely. You kind of nailed the overall theme of the stuff that you guys both have worked on. Life changing. Right. Making an impact that's super apparent on the things that you guys want to work on and now have obviously embarked on here. And that also includes some like the Aira team, what they were working on before too, which it seems like a good grouping of people have kind of moved over to help on this. That's pretty great to have the band back together for that. Anything to speak to of having the whole team here or not the whole, but some of the team.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's super interesting. At Aira, the team was like a family. So I think it's not surprising that the same group of people kind of wanted to come and solve another really impactful problem in this space. And I worked with Suman for over four years now. We have a fun time building a positive environment for ourselves to work in and other people. He's super creative, so he's a really great counterpart for me personally. So I really enjoy having him as a mentor and a leader. So it was kind of a no brainer when he asked to ask me to come and help him out. Same with other people. And I really think having the Aira perspective has been really important for the team here. You know, just having the vision of what we can really do with this product, thinking big and then also just taking the things that we did while at Aira and bringing it over here and the things that we learned from Aira that we wanted to do differently and then doing those things differently here. I think it's really exciting and it's a lot of fun to build with that family and build a new one with people like Sharon and her team.

Yeah, that's awesome. Really great. You talked about having family members sign up and being excited about that, which is great. And kind of coming out of stealth mode. Can you take us through a bit of the product development like where. Where you're at now and kind of where what it's going to take to maybe you're already monetizing and take us through that piece as well?

Yeah. So like you said, we just came out of stealth mode. We were able to raise our seed round of $2 million. And then now I think the team is all heads down building the actual product that would bring value to the users. So that is our single focus right now. Right. To build the user value, to build the user awareness, and to bring the product to a state where everyone can benefit from. Right. So for the first half a year, we'll be focused on just that, just building the product, building a beautiful product that Christy is designing, and also just building the individual AI for each, every single person. And what that means is that we will be able to build something based on your memory stack, Neo, for example, that will recall solely your memory. If I ask Neil about his favorite tackle place, it'll be different from if I asked Christy's AI about her favorite taco place. We want that to be personal to you. We want that to be private to you. One thing that we really want to emphasize is our brand principles are not just things that we communicate out, but we also practice when we're developing the product itself. The privacy part, we're implementing blockchain when we're building the user specific infrastructure as well as user specific models. Christy, do you want to add anything about the beautiful designs and user experience?

Yeah, we're just trying to, like I mentioned, build this intuitive recall experience. It's kind of a newer take or newer interaction that people might not be familiar with. So we're trying to do that in a way that seems really seamless and not intimidating for people. I know sometimes certain people can be turned off by AI and that concept of AI, but what we're doing is something that should be really personal to you and feel like an extension of yourself. So it's been really fun building out these features and seeing what kind of people are attracted to the product in these early stages.

Yeah. And can you take us through some of those use cases? I mean, you even talked about, you know, someone's grandpa maybe who is on early stages of dementia. Like, are those some of the use cases you could see potentially this being used for?

Definitely in the future. We want to target aging and early stage memory loss. That's on our roadmap. I think we have a ways to go before we're ready to really launch into that market. So a few years down the line, that's definitely where we want to be right now. Some of the use cases like Sharon mentioned could be super simple personal facts, like, what was that taco spot I ate at last week that I really enjoyed? And my AI would be able to just show me the name of it, really easy, give me the link, that kind of stuff. And then I think something that's relevant to people right now in the COVID environment is hopping on back to back zoom meetings throughout your day and rapid context switching with different distractions and meetings. And then our product is able to capture your thoughts in real time so you don't have to worry about taking notes and can recall any information for you on demand. Like what were those deliverables Suman asked for on Monday? Or what did I speak to sharing about Blockchain last month? And I can see all of those memories related to those concepts in that timeframe. And right now we see people who are attracted to the product are these early tech adopters and they're very interested in the role that AI will play in their lives and in the future. So many people are interested in improving their productivity, organization and efficiency, also improving their well being, expanding their intelligence and improving communication skills. I think the communication skills is really interesting because people who like to public speaker or thought leaders in the community want to know what they said and how people may have perceived it. So that's some of the things that our AI can help them retrospectively learn from and improve on in real time in the future. And we see this product being useful for people like therapists, counselors, different working professionals to be find this in the future and then obviously the early stage like memory loss space for aging individuals.

Got it. Okay, so if people are interested right now, what's the engagement like going up and kind of signing up for a wait list or how's the engagement with a new potential user like me right after this podcast?

Yeah, so you can totally go to our website Hu Ma AI to sign up for your own to start building your memory stack as well as signing up for your iap. So what is iap, you may ask, is our version of thinking about a AI address. So think about your AI being living in the cloud and anyone that communicates to your AI, including you, would be communicating through that specific address. Right. So it's almost like an IP address for your computer, but this is the IP address for your AI. And how we imagine the world to be a few years in the future will be just like everyone has a Gmail account right now. Everyone will have a AIP for their individual.

Wow, fascinating. Okay, really cool. So that's already. That's live. Everyone can go and get engaged in that way right now. I kind of see this as not equivalent at all from an AI perspective, but superhuman. What it's trying to do to email. I think you guys are like next generation for recalling kind of your whole day's working life, being able to organize them in a certain way. What's on the horizon for not just other user groups, but future tech that you want to build out.

So we think about like AI recall as a evolution, right? So you can think about the first level of recall is you recalling your own memories and you recalling what you did yesterday, what did you talk about today with Christy or with Neil on this podcast, for example. And then the second level would be team space. So if you think about us collaborating in a document, for example, you can essentially choose, say, to subscribe to Neil's AI because he's expert in the San Diego tech space. So I'll say, hey, I want to subscribe to Neil's AI. So when I type about San Diego, you have news perspectives, right? So that's what we call the AI collaboration. And another piece, if you think about how we want to advertise yourself to the public, for example, Christy is expert in designing user experience, so she may choose to expose those certain concepts of her AI to the public. So anyone can subscribe to Christie's AI. And that's actually how where our mind's at is for the monetization part for the people to. If you think about every individual as a content creator and we're in this ownership economy, you yourself is a podcaster, so you're familiar with that, right? So we want to have people being able to monetize their expertise. Expertise. And you don't have to be Elon Musk to advertise your expertise. You can be anyone that really have the core knowledge. Right. So I think the principle of democratizing knowledge and democratizing individual person expertise really comes from there. So that's where the tech is going from the self to the team and then to the public.

Wow, Fascinating. This is super cool. Well, congrats on what you guys have built and what you are building. Super grateful you're building it in San Diego as well too. What's the team like? How big is the team right now and what's it going to grow to with this new round of funding?

Yeah, we have seven full time people right now. And then we do have a few other contractors that are working with us as well. We do have a few openings on our tech team. Sharon can probably add more about that, but definitely want to add more talent in AI space in our engineering department also designers as well. I'm in need of some design help. So Any UX or graphic design hires we're interested in. We do have some marketing needs. So you know, we have a big vision and a big roadmap like Sharon laid out and now we're trying to find people to join the family and help us build those things.

Awesome. Sharon, anything you want to touch on on talent on your team?

Yeah, I think Christy covered the major roles that we have open. So we just closed a few roles here locally and we are definitely looking for AI hire as well as looking for mobile and blockchain hire as well. So we're taking on a lot of things and we need all the help we can get. And we're also open to having interns work with us. We have a few interns that have been brilliant and they're like part of the family, part of the team. So we would love to have more.

Great. Love to hear it. Speaking of local and Christie's specifically you have working at a few different local startups. Do I have some trivia that you may have had a hand in designing Trust in Will's logo. Is that true?

Yes, that is true. Yeah. Cody Barbo is a good friend of mine. We know each other through San Diego State. I worked at his first startup industry so that's where our working relationship developed. And after chapter industry closed, he was starting his new venture at Trust and Will and asked me if I wanted to be a part of it by helping out with the logo. And it was, I mean he's awesome to work with. He's super creative and fun. So yeah, we've worked on many design projects together on the side so it's been a lot of fun.

That's awesome. They're another beloved company here in town. Well, awesome. Well, we wouldn't be complete about building a team or a company in San Diego without knowing your favorite taco spots. We're going to put you on the spot here, Sharon. Do you want to go first?

Sure. So I actually moved to San Diego during COVID so I have not physically been to many tacos spots but one of the favorite places I order from is fish district from in Del Mar. But I'm hoping you guys can tell me other taco spots to try.

Absolutely. And welcome to town. That's great to have you here.

Thanks for.

For me my. I guess my favorite like beach taco shop. I love Oscars and pb. I think that's my all time favorite. So whenever I'm in the area I like to go there. Not only tacos, I love their ceviche. Is really good. And then right now I live by Old Town, so there's so many great spots there. I think Cafe Coyote was the first one I ever went to when I moved to San Diego, so that's still near and dear to my heart.

Yeah, that's awesome. Sharon, we gotta. We'll get you the database full of every interviewee's favorite taco spot that you can hear at the end of every episode here. But thank you both for sharing and being on the podcast and for building what yout Are. We're really excited for human AI. So thanks, guys.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap.

For our rad intro music.

And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest coworking in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Blum on Twitter Bloom as well as Fresh Brewed Tech and Tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

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Hey, Sam.