Fans of the movie Her will remember "Samantha" as the AI who connected with a human because of her ability to express deep empathy. That's what Michelle Zhou, cofounder and CEO of Juji, references when explaining what her company aims to do: create empathetic and responsible artificial intelligence agents. By focusing on human-machine symbiosis, Zhou has worked toward creating AI chatbots for different types of use cases, from personalized healthcare to conducting interviews.

Show notes

Conversation with Michelle Zhou (1:35)

Juji builds empathetic and responsible AI chatbots (0:45)

Humans feeling more comfortable with machines (3:48)

Where did the name Juji come from? (4:55)

Books by Cilfford Nass, a renowned Stanford researcher on human-computer interaction (8:02)

Kim Scott speaking about ruinous empathy (15:29)

Eye roll, please (21:51)

Target the biggest market possible (21:54)

We should be able to explain how we design and train AI systems (29:41)

Listener question (26:48)

From Ari via email:

I'd like to hear All Turtles' leadership team's reaction to a quote in the Wired interview of Geoff Hinton: "[There's a question of whether] regulators should insist that you can explain how your AI system works. I think that would be a complete disaster."

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