Personal AI: The $10M Bet on Digital Twins

Personal AI, not artificial general intelligence. Ur AI's $10.3 million bet. Now this is, according to Business Wire, what I'm sharing with you, which means it's a press release by the company. So always good to verify things and not just take at face value everything in a press release. But it did strike me as as interesting and worthy of comment. UR AI has raised $10.3 million to to build what it calls Individual AI's Private High Fidelity digital twins trained on a person's memories, voice and decision patterns. The Palo Alto startup formerly known as Eternos Life is backed by Mayfield and Boldstart Ventures and plans a winter 2025 launch for creators, prosumers and professionals. UR AI says it isn't chasing one model for everyone. Each AI is containerized and self owned, designed to scale presence, creativity and mentorship while keeping personal data secure. CEO and co founder Robert Locasco put it this way, the industry is chasing the wrong goal. We're building intelligence that's as unique as a fingerprint. Boldstart's Ed Sims calls individual AIs the next frontier. And Mayfield's Navin Chadha says the shift is toward the deeply personal intelligence. A proprietary human life model aims to encode stories, values and judgment so the system doesn't just echo past statements. It reasons the way you would and admits when it doesn't know. Okay, so what's the real message here? More and more money is being pushed into AI startups to create clones. Digital AI clones for individuals, for you, for me and your work colleagues. This is going to change the nature of work, the nature of memory and history. You don't have to do it, but if you don't start planning now, someone else might steal your own unique ideas and history. Let's dig a little deeper. So, full disclosure, this is a field I'm particularly interested in because I have my own AI clone. It may be a competitor of this company, the service I'm using, and that's okay. I. I'm not here to promote anyone's service provider, but I think that many people initially are afraid of digital clones and think that it somehow means they are robbing themselves of their own humanity. I view it as empowerment. So I have my own individual digital AI clone. It's. You've seen my advertisements for it. It's tjwalker AI where everything I'm saying right now on this show is uploaded into the clone's brain. By tomorrow morning, every video I've ever made on social media is input into the brain. The Database of my clone, every online video I've made in my hundreds of online courses, it's all in there. So this is something I use myself sometimes because it helps me remember things I've said. I could say, hey tj, what did you think about the Academy Award winning speeches for from 2011? And it can tell me exactly what I said. So it's a great enhancement because I don't remember stuff. It also allows me to help more people like you because my own students have access at no cost initially to use my clone. And it can give them feedback on their set, it can give them critiques of their speech, their sound bites, and I don't have to be there. And it can happen 24 hours a day. So I like it for that. The other way I've started using this is I ask my own clone to give me a daily 5 minute motivational speech to remind me of good habits that I want to practice on a regular basis. Some I already write down and look at in text, some I have emailed to me, but my clone will say, hey tj, remember, start each day with a glass of water. Drink one or two glasses of water before each meal. And to my podcasting audience, I just took a sip of water. And tips like have a glass of water next to you all day long. So anytime you're thirsty, you just sip. Basic little tips like that. I have my own AI clone, sometimes in a video format, sometimes in an audio format remind me of things that I've decided I want to do to program my life. Because. Because without that, the big problem for most of us is we are programmed by other algorithms, by other big companies. Netflix. Hey, I love Netflix. But Netflix is constantly trying to program you to watch the next episode. They don't care if you don't get enough sleep and you wake up groggy the next day and are not as effective at work. They want more watch time that benefits them. And someone like Jeff Bezos is constantly sending you messages, buy more stuff that makes him richer. He doesn't really care if you now have massive credit card debt and you can't pay your bills and you've destroyed your credit. He just wants to make sure your Amazon prime is up to date and you keep buying stuff. So that's why I have my own clone essentially try to counter program my brain. My clone reminds me when I ask it to give me tips on how I should live my life. My clone reminds me, TJ, don't buy stuff you don't need. TJ if it's a big expense. Why don't you wait 24 hours before hitting that buy button? Simple tip. So that's how I use it. If you have your own clone, let me know. And how you use it. If you're thinking maybe if it's really cheap and inexpensive, maybe I would let me know that. Now, we're not quite at the point where I can just have my clone show up and do a live show from stories in the news today. But who knows? It might get to that point now. I still want to do it. I don't really want to just sit back and sit on the sofa. Which reminds me, there's a great new book out by Columbia law professor Tim Wu, and he's got a phrase in it. So people are talking about the singularity. When AI gets so good, everything comes together and there's general artificial intelligence. He says we should really be more worried about the sofa larity. The sofa larity is when everything is so easy from robots, AI clones, you don't have an excuse to get off the sofa. And my fear is we may get to that point relatively soon. I don't want to be there. I want to get up off the sofa and come to you and do a show with you every day. Let's look at a couple more facts here. Again, here's yet another company that got more than $10 million from to help people create. They call it digital twins. Some people call it digital clones. There's a lot of different words for this, but it's basically taking your ideas, your thought process, putting it in the cloud, putting it in a database, and then having it come out again sometimes with your own voice, which my clone does. It really does sound, I would say, 95% like my. If you're interested in that again, you don't have to pay anything. If you want to check out my clone is at tjwalker AI.