February 2020
Being Human
Humans forget. It’s part of what makes us human and striving to remember has shaped a tremendous amount about how we live.
Think about that for a moment. Think of all the things in our lives that we’ve created or that we do because of our imperfect memory. The origin of written language was to help us remember financial transactions. We carry little notebooks to remember our ideas. The invention of photography was inspired by wanting to remember visual scenes. Statues, pyramids, and buildings have been built to remember rulers and past legacies. Maps help us remember how to navigate places we’ve been to before. Innumerable religious and secular holidays serve to commemorate, to remember events in history. Interestingly, there’s also research to suggest that there’s a purpose to forgetting, though. Forgetting helps us reason and understand by forcing us to generalize and abstract.
While forgetting has led to incredible things, both profound and mundane, it also causes us no end of frustration and even catastrophe. Memory loss can even lead to us forgetting who we are and has otherwise resulted in untold tragic loss. This is why humanity has worked so hard to combat it.
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Long Term Memory
At its core, memory retention is a biological problem. But instead of focusing on fixing people with brain enhancement drugs or surgical implants, why not build a tool to solve the problem? Imagine a tool that can capture spoken conversations and written thoughts throughout the day and create a personal digital memory bank. We believe that key emerging technological trends can do that, most importantly artificial intelligence. We now have the ability to transform digital data into rich digital memories, preserved and available to recall forever. The compelling design challenge is how do you “remember” this digital memory? What sort of cognitive technology do we need?
The problem with the existing tools and methods of today is that the information you’re capturing is already lossy because you have already started forgetting pieces of the information you learned when you go to write it down. And, think about all the times you’ve tried to find information in notebooks, productivity apps and so on. Estimates suggest that 20% of our workday is spent searching for information, not to mention time spent capturing it. Our goal in our approach is to reduce the time people spend looking for information by creating an ambient recall experience. This experience should be effortless, in the moment, and require little action from the user.
We search for information but we recall our memories.
- Suman Kanuganti
Personal.ai
This is why we, at Personal.ai, all came together, with the mission to build an AI for each individual to augment human biological memory; the vision to change how we humans fundamentally retain, recall, and relive our own memories. At the core are the principles that represent who we are and what we are building: meaningful, authentic, transparent and inclusive. We feel responsible for spearheading this mission in creating a personal AI for everyone.
We are a collective of entrepreneurs, technologists, scientists, and creatives who are passionate about pushing beyond the bounds of conventional thinking and using technology to solve human problems - memory retention and recall.
Capture, Create, Connect
Our solution is at the same time pretty simple, yet quite complex. One core use case for Personal AI is to record your memories and make them readily accessible to browse and recall. You can ask what the insightful thoughts are from a conversation, the name of your friend’s spouse you met the week before, or the Berkeley restaurant recommendation you got last month. Personal AI creates a digital long term memory that is structured and lasts forever.
To build your intranet of memories, we capture the memories that you say, type, or see, and transform them into Memory Blocks in real time. This architecture is inspired by a neuroscientific understanding of human memory - memories as semi-structured multi-modal interconnected graphs of knowledge. The Memory Blocks are stored in a Memory Stack that is private to an individual and well secured. Every human is unique, every human’s Memory Stack represents the identity of the individual. We build an AI that is trained entirely on top of one individual human being’s memories so it is authentic to them.
Equitable AI
Building a purely functioning product isn’t enough. Part of our goal is to empower all humans with the benefits of equitable AI as an inalienable right; an AI that is built from each individual's memories and that is private. Our ultimate goal is to benefit individual human lives by retaining memories so they can be effortlessly and, more importantly, securely recalled.
When we are building technology that simulates the human mind, it begins with the responsibility and principles that align with human rights. We recognize that personal AIs of individuals will have huge implications for our society and we must be intentional about aligning ourselves with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) standards for human rights. There are a lot of complex unanswered questions that require more nuanced answers than slogans. When thinking about some of these questions, we kept coming back, not necessarily to finals answers, but to who we thought should be involved in the conversation. The stakeholders beyond the profit makers.
Over the past decade, the commercialization of the Internet has evolved into the business of data ownership. Successful businesses benefited from aggregating and owning large amounts of data and tech giants have made trillions off of this way of thinking about data and AI. They did this by providing free products to the consumers in exchange for their data, often leading to exploiting the engagement behaviors of consumers.
This, along with the bias in data and the methods used in current machine learning represent what we see as the limitations of centralized AI models - AI models created on the aggregated data of many individuals. We believe the macro trends of Web 3.0 and the decentralization of data ownership is changing the dynamics of AI services, however, which will lead to the economic benefits shifting from tech conglomerates to individuals.
Here are the 3 key issues we are addressing in this macro environment with an approach to building personal AIs that strengthens the connections between people:
- Decentralization of ownership establishes trust through self-sovereignty of data: The shift in data ownership from a centralized institutional authority to individual data ownership is a perfect framework for thinking about how Personal.ai can respect and protect the privacy of individual memories. We are building on Web 3.0 technologies optimizing for self-sovereignty of data differentiating from Web 2.0 technologies optimized for corporate sovereignty. We are addressing the issues of privacy beyond digital consent to give individuals some form of sovereign control over their identity and the use of their personal data in the form of their personal AIs.
- Decentralization of AI establishes authenticity and human rights by removing bias in aggregated models: In the past decade, AI models were trained on large amounts of aggregated data to extract value and insights for corporate interests ($2.9T AI market). This framework has led to major issues with bias and with truth and accuracy in these models. Decentralization of AI means shifting and bringing value to people so that advances in AI serve all people (IEEE) rather than benefiting specific groups, nations or a corporation.Central to this is practicing the values of transparency and accountability.
- Decentralization of the economy facilitates monetary benefits to individuals by tokenization of personal AI utility: The top 5 companies in the US make up 20% of the S&P market. Centralized data ownership and centralized AI models have disrupted the idea of an equitable society and increased the economic gap amongst people. The advent of decentralization technologies such as blockchain and decentralizing the monetization of individuals’ assets as NFTs has already shifted the economic dynamic in the art and music industry. We are leveraging these tokenization frameworks to extend beyond today's where people can monetize their own AIs for their economic benefit. The Web 3.0 revolution enables a positive-sum ecosystem for people and the communities around them.
We are spearheading a new generation of technology that has the potential to positively impact how humans live and enjoy their lives and the societies around them in our digital future. Our dream is that one day you, the people around you, and the entirety of humanity will have access to their own individual AI to extend their memory capacity and uplift their lives that further unlocks the potential of humans without the limitations of time and capacity.
We recognize there are lots of deep questions around this and we welcome challenging conversations about it. Thank you for allowing us to take you a bit deeper into our thoughts on why we are building personal AIs for everyone.
Truly, The Founding Team:
Suman Kanuganti
Sharon Zhang
Kristie Kaiser
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