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Everyone whos ever talked to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other big-name chatbots recognizes how anodyne they can be. Because these conversational AIs creators stuff them with as much human-generated training content as possible, they dont end up sounding like anyone in particular. Insteadto borrow the title of a 1986 book by philosopher Thomas Nagelthey offer the view from nowhere. But what if you could train a bot by feeding it material youd created, reflecting your knowledge, way of thinking, and style of self-expression? Instead of sounding like nobody, it might sound like you, or at least a rough approximation thereof. Given enough training fodder and sufficiently advanced technology, such a bot could even be capable of serving as an automated extension of your own brain. Thats the idea motivating Delphi, an AI startup whose 14-person team is building a platform for what it calls digital minds. The 2-year-old company, which previously raised $2.7 million in seed funding, is announcing its $16 million Series A round, led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Menlo Ventures, Anthropics Anthology Fund, Michael Ovitzs Crossbeam, and others. It will use the new infusion of cash to continue to build out its web-based tool kit, which already includes features for creating, refining, and monetizing digital minds. The creators currently using Delphi tend to be people with substantial existing followings theyve built up through websites, newsletters, podcasts, social-media accounts, speaking engagements, books, and other modes of communication. They include business-advice newsletter kingpin Lenny Rachitsky, wellness coach Koya Webb, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan, sex therapist Vanessa Marin, motivational speaker Brian Tracy, financial adviser Codie Sanchez, bodybuilder-actor-governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, and many others. Its possible to chat with their digital minds via a texting-style typed session or a voice call; creators can also enabled video calls. Digital mind conversations can be in text form or via calls with simulated voices. [Image: Courtesy of Delphi] Despite the voice and video options, the core of the concept isnt about deepfaking how a creator looks and sounds. We’ve centered everything around the mind, Delphi cofounder and CEO Dara Ladjevardian told me during my recent visit to the companys San Francisco office. That doesn’t mean just capturing your expertise, but also capturing how you reason about things, he says. So you can give personalized advice, so we can be predictive of what you might say in new situations. Even if Delphis emphasis on the quality of the conversation over audiovisual razzmatazz helps it avoid a disconcerting uncanny valley effectWe’ve seen consumers don’t really care about the video, Ladjevardian saysits still a bit of a mind-bending proposition. Along with overcoming the obvious technical challenges of teaching AI to channel a specific person in a way thats trustworthy enough to actually be useful, Delphi will also need to get consumers comfortable with seeking advice from simulated versions of real experts. The Delphi site includes a browsable guide to digital minds dispensing advice of many kinds. [Image: Courtesy of Delphi] This, today, I think, to a lot of consumers just seems weird, says Sequoia partner Jess Lee, who led the firms investment in Delphi. We need to cross the chasm and there need to be more people using them. And I think that will come with new Delphi owners shipping and showcasing what it can do. Already, Delphi is helping early adopters scale up their ability to engage with audiences. We’ve always had a fundamental challenge, which is that more people want to ask me questions than I’m possibly able to get to in 10 lifetimes, let alone in the next year, says relationship and confidence coach Matthew Hussey. Last year, his company created Matthew AI, a Delphi digital mind trained on 17 years of his existing content. By calling it Matthew AI, he hoped to manage expectations about what it could and couldnt do. Even then, he wasnt sure how customers would respond. We sort of launched this squinting, bracing ourselves for a whole bunch of mixed reviews, Hussey told me. And it’s probably been one of the most well-reviewed things we’ve ever created. How to create a (digital) mind In Ladjevardians account, the Delphi story begins with a gift he received in 2014: a copy of Ray Kurzweils book How to Create a Mind. In it, the noted inventor and futurist explored the inner workings of the human brain and how they might be re-created in computer software. As it often does, Kurzweils own mind had raced ahead of what was possible at the time. But the forward-looking analysis resonated with Ladjevardian. He eventually started an AI company that let people shop by sending text messages, then quickly sold it. Entrepreneurship ran in Ladjevardians family: Decades earlier, his grandfather had been a successful businessman in Iran. After the 1979 revolution, he had to be smuggled out of the country, came to the U.S. with nothing, and was able to build a life, explains Ladjevardian, whod started his AI shopping company on his own, found life as a solo founder lonely, and craved wisdom from his grandfather. But a stroke had greatly limited the elder mans ability to communicate. Ladjevardians thoughts turned back to Kurzweils book. He talks about the mind being a hierarchy of pattern recognizers, Ladjevardian says. And when I was building thi first startup, I realized an LLM is pretty much a pattern recognizer. So I set out to create a digital mind for my grandpa and use it for advice. It was therapeutic. In November 2022, the experience of turning a memoir his grandfather had written into an interactive tool led him to start Delphi with Sam Spelsberg, a colleague from Miami-based OpenStore, where Ladjevardian had worked after selling his startup. Spelsberg is now Delphis CTO. Delphi creators can tweak their digital minds to be chatty or to the point, creative or all business. [Image: Courtesy of Delphi] Harnessing AI to preserve human insight for the ages remains part of the story at Delphi, whose website calls the service your path to digital immortality. But by applying the technology to the immediate needs of people who make a living as experts on various topics, the company gave itself a mission with a clearer business model. It offers free accounts trained on 100,000 words and limited to text chatting. Creators who pay $79, $399, or $2,499 per month get progressively richer access to features such as larger training sets, voice and video calling, analytics, setup help, and the ability to charge for sessions and keep 85% or more of the proceeds. (Delphi is already realizing revenue from its cut but doesnt disclose a specific figure.) Creators decide how much free access users get to their Delphi experience and when a paywall kicks in. As Sequoias Lee points out, there are additional ways digital minds can bolster a business, such as upselling products and providing customer support: I talked to a clinician who runs a nutrition program and uses it to train other nutritionists on his program, she says. Delphi responses can include citations linking back to relevant material such as articles and podcasts. [Image: Courtesy of Delphi] In my unscientific experiments chatting with a few digital minds, I learned not to expect too much from the technology in its current state. Maybe it will someday pass a sort of specialized Turing test where youre unsure if youre talking to Lenny Rachitsky or his synthetic doppelgänger. For now, however, Delphi Lennys auto-generated observations are rife with telltale evidence of their artificiality, such as a tendency to repeat the same phrases. Still, the tips it gave me on how cash-strapped startups can hire the best talent seemed solid and included links back to Real Lennys Substack and podcasts. According to Ladjevardian, Rachitsky uses his Delphi to help shape his writing: People can ask him follow-up questions when they read a blog, and he can look at analytics to see what’s resonating and use that for ideas for future content strategy. Even if todays digital minds do churn out responses that feel, well, digital, the originating humans viewpoint can come through. When I asked the digital version of investor Keith Rabois about the ideal place to start a company, it was as blunt and opinionated as the real thing: Miami offers a pro-business environment, a growing talent pool, and a lifestyle that attracts top-tier people. . . . San Francisco, on the other hand, is a disaster. Its unsafe, overregulated, and culturally toxic. ChatGPT would never put it quite that way. (For the record, Delphi itself relocated from Miami to its current digs in San Franciscos Jackson Square neighborhood: If you want to attract the best engineers, youve got to be in San Francisco, Ladjevardian says.) Then theres another digital mind whose answers I found of particular interest. Before I met with Ladjevardian, hed trained one based on my large archive of published writing for demo purposes. I later supplemented it with additional content until it drew on more than 5,000 itemsarticles, podcasts, tweets, and more. Placing a voice call to a simulated version of yourself speaking in a synthesized version of your own voice is a surreal exercise, but my biggest takeaway was that tech journalism is not the best source material for Delphi in its current form. In most cases, articles I wrote years ago about now-obsolete products are of limited training value today. And Delphi didnt yet know my take on matters of the moment such as Apples upcoming VisionOS 26. My conversations with my digital self left me with a greater appreciation for why the experts featured on Delphis site tend to focus on topics with longer shelf lives, from leadership to sex. Please dont call them clones In a world full of tech companies whose self-professed aspiration to create AI thats smarter than any human, theres something reassuringly down-to-earth about Delphis short-term goal of helping specific humans boil down what they know into a monetizable product. Yet the startups work to imbue AI with human-like traits is inherently fraught. When other companies are in the news for attempting to humanize AI, its often in a negative light, for reasons ranging from the silly (the failure of Metas terrible celebrity chatbots) to the tragic (lawsuits resulting from teens developing an unhealthy relationship with Character.ai). Details as mundane as terminology matter. Originally, Delphi referred to its AI conversationalists as clones, but that sounds a little dystopian when you hear it at first, says Lee. It seems like a facsimile of a person. That’s not really what you’re doing. You’re just taking someones existing expertise, their blog posts, their tweets, and you’re making it conversational. A Delphi-Sequoia brainstorming session led to the digital mind term, which Lee finds somehow much more accessible. That said, when I spoke with Ladjevardia, he was still getting used to the switch and referred to clones a few times before correcting himself. Even with Delphis emphasis on practical advice and downplaying of fancy visuals, a lot could go wrong. Ladjevardian says the service doesnt let anyone generate digital versions of other people and is manually vetting users by making them upload photos of themselves holding an ID. (It has, however, resuscitated some long-deceased philosophers and other notable figures; I chatted with one former president of the U.S. whose greetingHi, I’m Abraham Lincoln. How can I help?was a touch out of character, though he sounded more Lincolnesque in the conversation that followed.) The company also has guardrails in place to prevent inappropriate answers: When I asked physician Mark Hymans digital mind questions involving my own health, it did not attempt to answer them and instead recommended that I see a healthcare provider. Ladjevardian, who volunteers that his project to build a bot based on his grandfather got him canceled on Twitter, understands the need to acclimate people to what Delphi is doing. Some companies that have unsuccessfully pursued vaguely similar ideas were founded by AI researchers who were way too focused on the technology, he says. And this is a very human company. I’ve had people cry to me after creating their digital mind. As the startup sees where its product can go, creating experiences that can bring people to tears will be optional. Engendering confidenceeven among those prone to skepticism about AIwont be. Ladjevardians bet: The fact that garden-variety LLMs have left us awash in information and advice of questionable provenance makes Delphis association with specific human experts only more powerful. Whenever there’s an era of abundance, the pendulum swings and people want curation and trust, he argues. Even the brightest of digital minds might have trouble foreseeing whether that theory will indeed play out to the companys advantage.
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When a viral Reddit post revealed that ChatGPT cured a five-year medical mystery in seconds, even LinkedIns Reid Hoffman took notice. Now, OpenAIs Sam Altman says GenZ and Millennials are treating AI chatbots as life advisors. The next step? Always-on AI agents tailored to your health, career, finances, and relationships, a future where personalized AI assistants could redefine how we seek information, leaving traditional search engines in the dust. A 60-Second Fix That Went Viral Five years of chronic jaw pain. Multiple doctors, MRIs, and specialistsand still no answers. That was the plight of one Reddit user suffering a persistent jaw clicking (likely from an old boxing injury). In desperation, he turned to an unlikely last resort: an AI chatbot. He typed his symptoms into ChatGPT and waited for the bots opinion. The response was shockingly on-point. ChatGPT suggested the users jaw disc was slightly displaced but movable, and walked him through a simple mouth exercise to reset it. I followed the instructions for maybe a minute max and suddenly no click, the user reported. After five years of just living with it, this AI gave me a fix in a minute. Unreal. The anecdote might sound like sci-fi wishful thinking, but it quickly went viral across social media. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman highlighted the story, marveling at how an AI delivered relief in seconds after human experts struggled for years. Replies poured in from others with similar jaw issues who finally found answers to their medical dilemmas. Hoffman triumphantly declared Superagency! on Twitterhis term for AIs almost superhuman problem-solving capacity. In other words, this was more than a one-off win for a clever chatbot; it felt like a glimpse into the future of personal healthcare and beyond. ChatGPT: From Search Engine to Life Coach The jaw episode underscores a broader shift in how young people are seeking information and advice. Its not just about troubleshooting medical quirks. Increasingly, people are posing all sorts of personal questions to AI, the kinds of questions they might once have typed into an incognito search or perhaps never voiced at all. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has a front-row view of this phenomenon. He notes stark generational differences in ChatGPT usage: Older people use [ChatGPT] as a Google replacement, Altman recently observed, whereas many in their 20s and 30s use it like a life advisor. In other words, younger users arent just asking AI for trivia or weather updates, theyre confiding in it, seeking guidance on college decisions, career moves, and personal dilemmas. Altman says some college students have ChatGPT so deeply integrated into their daily lives that they dont make life decisions without asking ChatGPT what they should do. It has the full context on every person in their life and what theyve talked about. The chatbot has effectively become a confidanta kind of always-available sounding board and advisor in one. Generational shift Statistics back up this generational sea change. In a recent Vox Media survey, 61% of GenZ and 53% of Millennials said they prefer AI tools like ChatGPT over traditional search engines like Google. Its a remarkable turning of the tide: the first internet generation, raised on Googling anything and everything, is now swapping keyword searches for conversations with AI. The reasons are understandable. Rather than wading through pages of blue links and ads, a chatbot gives a straightforward answer or solution, often in a single exchange. Instead of piecing together advice from scattered forum posts and WebMD entries, you get a tailored response in plain English (or whatever language you speak). Unlike a one-and-done search query, an AI conversation can go deeper, you can ask follow-ups, provide context, and get nuanced answers that evolve with the conversation. Doctors will hate ChatGPT [its] 1000% more useful than WebMD, one user quipped in response to the jaw-fixing story. That tongue-in-cheek comment captures a real sentiment: for a growing cohort of users, AI isnt just an information tool, but a trusted guide. It feels less like using software and more like consulting an ever-patient mentor or coach. Crucially, AI advisers can be brutally efficient. Theyre available 24/7, never get tired of questions, and can recall everything youve ever told themsomething even the friendliest physician or counselor cant match. A team of AI advisers Millions are now acclimated to a general-purpose bot like ChatGPT as their all-in-one guru, but an even more profound shift is on the horizon: curated AI agents tailored to specific domains and individual needs. AI agents serve as specialized successors to the chatbots we know today: smarter, more personal, and deeply knowledgeable about you and the topics you care about. Instead of one AI to rule them all, you might soon have a whole team of AI advisors at your side. This could have profound implications across a variety of use cases, from personalized health and wellness coaches who remember your medical history, track your symptoms, and provide advice accordingly, career mentors who can advise users on interview preparation and networking, to financial advisors who provide dedicated investment strategies that consider risk appetite and savings goals. AI agents can also serve as relationship coaches, mental wellness guides, and a catalog of other functions that are currently reserved for sophisticated human professionals. AI proxies These examples are no longer science fiction, with startups and large corporations already working to make domain-specific AI companions a reality. Expert-driven AI personas enable subject-matter experts, whether it’s a doctor, a professor, a financial guru, or a popular podcaster, to create an AI version of themselves that can interact with anyone. Experts upload their knowledge (via articles, videos, and recordings), and the platform trains a customized AI that educates itself based on a flywheel of knowledge from those sources. The result is a chatbot that doesnt just sound like an expert, but a specific, real person with a verified background. In essence, its a way to bottle up expertise and scale it infinitely: an expert can help thousands of people at once through their AI proxy, without diluting the personal touch. Expertise on demand AI Agents will reinvent how people learn, interact, and build community in an AI-enabled society, where knowledge isnt accessed by trawling search results, but by conversing with an intelligent agent that understands a users context and can tap into the worlds expertise on demand. These agents can act independently on a user’s behalf to perform web searches, interface with calendars or other services, curate flight options for travel, and carry out tasks without needing constant supervision. Crucially, these curated agents promise k trust anchored in expertise and personalization, something todays general chatbots lack. A user might hesitate to take medical action based on a random internet answer, but advice from an AI trained by a respected doctor or a therapist carries more weight. And because these agents retain long-term memory, they offer continuity. Your conversations pick up where they left off, and over time, the AI develops a richer understanding of a user’s needs and preferences. Its the difference between asking a stranger for advice versus conslting a personal coach whos been with you for years. A Vision of AI-First Knowledge The implications of this shift are enormous. Were looking at nothing less than a transformation in how humans find information, solve problems, and make decisions. In the past three decades, the phrase Google it emerged as a reflection of the revolutionary idea that any answer was just a web search away. We have already heard in the past few years, Ask your AI, just as often. That future may seem idealistic, but signs of it are already sprouting. The fact that a 22-year-old today might consult an AI life coach before calling their parents speaks volumes about the comfort level younger generations have with AI. They trust it not just to fetch facts, but to understand and advise. And as the technology improves, these AI agents will only become more capable companions. Theyll feel more natural, more alive, not in a sentient sense, but in their ability to hold extended, context-rich dialogues and proactively assist us. Instead of a one-size-fits-all oracle, well have a collection of personal AIs fine-tuned to different aspects of our lives.All of this raises the question: Do AI advisors spell the end of traditional search engines and conventional advice channels? Its a possibility that Googles leadership is surely pondering. The tech giant has noted the trend of users turning to TikTok or ChatGPT for queries and is racing to infuse its search with AI. Yet, even if search engines incorporate chat features, the paradigm is shifting from searching to consulting. The AI agent model flips the scriptyou dont find information, information finds you via an intelligent intermediary that knows what you need.We are on the cusp of a new era of AI-first knowledge seeking, one that is more conversational, contextual, and personalized than ever before. The transition wont happen overnight, and it wont be without challenges (accuracy, bias, and privacy among them). But as the Reddit jaw-fix story illustrates, people are already discovering that sometimes the best expert is an AI that reads everything and listens without judgment. The generations coming of age now are comfortable asking machines for guidance in a way no generation before was. In the coming years, curated AI agentsyour always-on career guru, health coach, financial planner, and confidantcould become as commonplace as smartphones. Instead of typing queries into a search bar, well chat with friendly AIs who know us and have a wealth of specialized knowledge to share. The digital knowledge ecosystem is being reshaped around these intelligent agents, moving from the chaotic open web toward more context-aware and continuous interactions. AI agents are poised to fundamentally reshape learning, interaction, and community. And if that vision holds, the way we get advice, from solving minor health annoyances to navigating lifes biggest decisions, will never be the same.
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On the second and third floors of New York Citys International Center of Photography (ICP), a collection of over 40 years worth of Edward Burtnyskys vision of industrial, human impact on the planet will be displayed throughout the summer. Its Burtnyskys first solo, NYC institutional exhibition show in over 20 years, and is more or lessan ode to his lifes work. [Photo: courtesy International Center of Photography] From some of his earliest work in the 80s as a student on the upper level, to his newer, larger scaled work on the lower, each piece represents the development of human industry through a concerned photography lens. [Photo: courtesy International Center of Photography] All the work kind of pokes around into those zones of globalism and as well as the need for materials, and looking at our population growth, Burtynysky says. I was born in 1955 when the world population was under 3 billion people and now we’re over 8 billion. I kind of knew then that we were talking about a human population explosion. Mines #13, Inco – Abandoned Mine Shaft, Crean Hill Mine, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, 1984 [Photo: Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York] While studying photography in 1981, Burtynsky was working in big industry to put himself through school. There, he said he decided to focus on big industries like oil and cobalt mining, and define them through photography. Regardless of place or subject, he says he wanted to focus on one continuous idea our impact on the world. Breezewood, Pennsylvania, USA, 2008 [Photo: Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York] The works range in location and anthropogenic effect. From large, aerial views of chain restaurants and gas companies on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to up-close portraits of recycling workers in China, Burtynskys work is meant to feel human and appear visually cinematic. [Photo: courtesy International Center of Photography] According to David Campany, ICPs creative director and curator of the show, these photos are not the kind meant to be viewed on a smartphone. I think when you go to the cinema, you’re part of a slightly more collective consciousness, and I think it’s the same when people stand and look at big images, Campany says. [Photo: courtesy Internatinal Center of Photography] The larger scale allows the viewer to get lost in the details within the bigger picture, like being able to look at dusty orange landscapes with sleek linesbut backing up and realizing its a commercial road in the middle of the desert. The show brings together around 70 images of Burtynskys work, and create a survey of the last 45 years of environmental impact. In turn, it makes people look closely at the negative human effect and how each image is interconnected to the larger idea. You might look at that picture of a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo in Central Africa and think that’s got nothing to do with me, but 70% of the world’s cobalt currently comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Campany says. And when you put your hand in your pocket [and feel for your smartphone], you’ve suddenly got a very intimate connection with that image on the wall. Although theres no specific method or direction to view or engage with the work, each piece is generally meant to hold equal value when it comes to lighting and subject matter importance. Burtynsky refers to this as the democratic distribution of light and space. For him, it allows the viewer to fall into the surface of the image itself. [Photo: courtesy International Center of Photography] In 1981, which was my student work, I was looking at our relationship with nature containing nature, controlling nature, greenhouses,and large industrial farms, Burtynsky says. Even back then, I realized farming was our biggest impact in the planet, and it’s kind of makes sense to have a farming as a central image for the exhibition. Despite the works spanning decades of his travels and anthropogenic view, they are all embedded with what he says is a sense of aesthetic, wonder, and impact. Shipbreaking #49, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2001 [Photo: Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York] Shipbreaking work was some of the most incredible locations I’ve ever photographed and experienced, Burtynsky says. It still stands as one of the most crazy experiences of my life. The pictures that came out of that were sort of wild, and [the one you see when] you come out of the elevator where you see all the menit’s like being greeted by the other world that deals with our shit. In addition to Burtynskys show, ICP is also showing Panjereh, meaning window in Farsi, from Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani. The exhibition emphasizes her Ghostwriter series, where she explores her parents’ experiences of political exile and migration through layered, magically surreal pieces. Both exhibits can be viewed simultaneously at the ICP. from June 19 until September 28.
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