Ethos
What happens to the world when we form social relationships with digital intelligence?
This is the central question asked by iconic sci-fi classics: The Bicentennial Man, Ex Machina, Blade Runner, Her, Westworld.
We need the answer faster than these authors imagined. Millions of people already confide in AI models, despite their obvious flaws, and it gets closer to mainstream with every model update. Humanity is about to allocate major social and emotional bandwidth to AI in what may be one of the most important cultural transitions of our lifetimes.
Empathic exists to steward this transition.
What we’re building
Talking with AI today is a crude bastardization of conversation. A floating orb, both intelligent and soulless, responds to your question. Then waits patiently for your next command.
There are easy ways to make this better. What if you gave the orb a face so you could make eye contact? What if the face felt real? What if it talked without being prompted.
We think there is an opportunity to create a new medium for AI, focused on presence and connection over realistic, real-time video. Real-time voice and video has moved from robotic to expressive, and tooling for low-latency inference is improving rapidly.
Who we are recruiting
This is a hard company, with a decades-long time horizon. We’re working on low-latency video generation models, real-time systems, and a new application layer.
We think it’s a worthy quest, because the best version of this technology means a friend who is always there, for any human on earth. If you are an exceptional builder, we’d love to welcome you to the team - we’re hiring in San Francisco.
Michael Lee
