Your Best AI Assistant is You
Our Investment in The Sentience Company
Perhaps eight years ago, I ran into someone at an event in Austin who was wearing a GoPro around his neck.
“Out of curiosity, are you recording this event and our conversation? Why?” I asked.
“Someday, we’re going to have technology that makes it easy to look up everything I’ve seen and learned. When that day comes, I’m going to have a big advantage, because I’ll have access to years of experiences and information that everyone else has discarded as soon as it happens.”
Total Recall
This gentleman wasn’t the only person to recognize the value of a digital collection of our lives. Stephen Wolfram has written about maintaining a decades-long archive of his emails, recorded meetings, and even each keystroke he’s made. Gordon Bell published a book called Total Recall in 2009, imagining the “e-memory revolution” that could enable us to create avatars that realistically emulate our thoughts.
For decades, forward-thinking technologists have speculated that someday, it will be trivially easy for each of us to trawl massive volumes of personal memories, to help us remember what happened, understand ourselves better, and build intelligence that can respond and act as we would. I believe that future is now possible–and in collaboration with my partner Ryan Kim, Bain Capital Ventures led a $6.5M seed financing backing Sam Kececi and The Sentience Company to help realize it.
Sentience’s plan is straightforward. We’ll help people collect memories by gathering from sources where that data exists, and capturing what disappears into the ether today. With those artifacts, we can enable superhuman memory, impactful personal analytics, personalized automation, and knowledge collaboration on your own terms.
Your Best AI Assistant
No doubt the major AI labs have created incredibly powerful, generally intelligent models, but anyone who has tried to use these models to write (say, investment announcement blog posts) has experienced a straightforward example of their limitations. By definition, the large language models are a composite voice and judgment of millions of people in their dataset, which doesn’t sound like me at all (and in fact is increasingly recognizable as a style of its own).
By making it easy to collect memories across different integration sources, and from video and audio capture, Sentience better understands how you speak, write, and over time, how you think or might complete a task. There’s obvious value in replicating how the median of a large number of people would do something–but there’s also value in scaling how any individual would accomplish it.
There are many meaningful technical choices necessary to create an experience that feels flawless and natural to the end user. Sentience has done and continues to refine its research on the latest techniques to surface the right memories. That includes a notion of discretion, which is complex to model: among the views you’ve expressed, how can Sentience know that in a particular context or for a certain audience, whether you’re willing to share that information or not?
Don’t Sell Your Soul
In getting to know Sam, founder and CEO of Sentience, over the past couple of years, I’ve been especially struck by how central mission is to his motivations. Sentience wants to make personal data security, privacy, and control possible in the era of AI.
Sam is too kind to say it this way, but to me there is something Faustian in the transactions that training data companies are making with human “experts” today. For tens or perhaps low hundreds of dollars an hour, dozens of these companies are asking people every day to sell a perpetual license to what they do and how they do it. Is that really a fair transaction? That doesn’t include the model labs that provide zero compensation to train on the styles of living writers, painters, thinkers, and other humans who happen to have their work in public.
Sentience offers a hopeful alternative: intelligence on data that is private, encrypted, and yours to own and control forever. They believe in this enough to have explored from the beginning how they could someday help you bequeath your Sentience data to the next generation, if you so choose.
We’re thrilled to support a mission-driven founder realizing a vision that’s not only useful for important memories and personal productivity, but also an important part of protecting individuality and securing personal (and personality) data in the post-AGI era.
As we announce this investment today, I wonder how that gentleman I encountered in Austin is doing. I hope he’s already searching his archive to check if he and I had indeed met that one day nearly a decade ago… and also that he’s looking forward to how companies like Sentience will help him add to his archives, retrieve critical memories, and scale his consciousness.