Avi Fein, founder of Meebo, discusses how AI can be used to extend people's capabilities rather than replace them. He explains the differences between Meebo and ChatGPT, and how YouTube's success is due to its product definition and monetization engine. He also talks about the importance of trusting individuals rather than brands when it comes to moderating the internet, and the road to monetization. A great and wide-reaching conversation.

Transcript

John McDonnell: Okay, so we have with us today, Avi Fein. Avi is the founder of Meebo, which is a platform for building personalized chatbots. Prior to that, he was a member at South Park Commons, and previously worked at Neeva and YouTube and Google. Avi, welcome to Pioneer Park.

Avi Fein: Thank you. Great to be here.

Bryan Davis: Yeah. Welcome. Good to see you. So we've been having some conversations prior to this, which I think at some point we all realized oh, we should probably turn on the microphones just so we can begin to capture some of this. And I think we were just on the con topic of talking about how to master chat and really like [00:01:00] some of the challenges of chat.

So first, can you just tell us a little bit about Meebo?

Avi Fein: Sure. So Meebo is a platform where we build chat bots out of creators of various topics. We look for people who are usually like experts in a certain thing and, really have proactively shared their knowledge. And then on the other side, there's people who trust them and want to connect with them to get almost like one-on-one advice for recommendations for, questions that they may have.

Where so much we're going to. I would say Instagram and TikTok and YouTube nowadays as being the place that we want to get knowledge out of and we want to get information from. But those are still static and a distant in many ways where, they're not relatable to you. They, can answer, really connect with things that you're interested in, and we want to break down those barriers and really use chat as an interface to make it interactable such that you can have conversation and go into the depths of both you and how it connects to that person and their knowledge and their content as well.

Bryan Davis: Cool. So I guess something that's really top of mind, I think for a lot of people right now is ChatGPT differentiate. Tell us [00:02:00] how Meebo is different than just run of the mill vanilla ChatGPT

Avi Fein: yeah. It's interesting cuz we started working on this before ChatGPT even came out, but I Very hipster of you.

Yeah. But I would say the foundational ideas and principles actually cut across. Even the post ChatGPT world and that one, what we wanted to do was break apart knowledge to not have it be a monolith anymore. And if you looked at what a lot of people experienced with the web and the internet today through products like Google and now ChatGPT it's relatively generic.

You get the same answer independent of who you are. Like if you do a Google search, if you do a ChatGPT like Q and A, we're all gonna get the same thing back. And our belief is that it's a much more. Delightful. And not only that, but like trustful experience when you can blow that up and go into the distribution of different perspectives and different niches of knowledge where someone's gonna have a slightly different take than, person A versus person B on a whole slew of things.

And so for us it's how do you take, [00:03:00] some of the technology that ChatGPT is good, but apply it to the diversity of human perspectives and knowledge in many ways. I think the second part that we build on, That's beyond ChatGPT is playing with the idea of how do you use the technology to extend people versus replace them.

And a lot of what people talk about in AI now is like these virtual assistants, which are just. SNTs of like humans where it's oh yeah, we've trained on a million of you and now this can do what all million of you can do. Like you should just use this one like AI bot. And that's true for art.

It's true for now chatGPT and knowledge of like why would you talk to anyone else about ChatGPT it knows the entire internet? And I think what goes unsaid in those things is that when you do that, you lose the integrity of in the nuance of all those individual people and all the individual relationships and the trust even that you may have in that.

And it becomes not to go back to the same [00:04:00] idea, but there's like monolith of just, the average across everything. And what we wanna lean into is, The individual. And it is like the personal, and it is the idea that we are all unique in our way and like how can it, how can AI extend us to give us superpowers versus just act as like a replacement of us all?

John McDonnell: So when you talk about that uniqueness, certainly from a in the first comment you were saying, oh unlike ChatGPT, we wanna be really personalized. How are you able to achieve that?

Avi Fein: I think it starts with people, and I like, we said before of what Meebo is like our building block, our atomic unit, was an individual creator, was as someone on YouTube. And really it's actually cutting crosses. It's like the person has, they're represented on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and even their website like that is like your identity. And so we started with the identity as being the atomic unit and then build up from that and the, Philosophy behind that was that you can capture their unique [00:05:00] perspective and their, you're their unique point of view, and then make that accessible and shareable with the world.

And by doing that, you can maintain this like boundary so that it's no longer like the aggregation of them, plus 10 others who are like them. And then you actually lose texture and you lose the nuances of like their experience of the world. And you also then from the other side as a user, Know who you're talking with and you can have a trusted relationship versus being like, you have to take this leap of faith with ChatGPT, though what they're saying to you is the authoritative truth of the internet, and you're like, we're in a post truth world.

What is the truth of the internet?

Bryan Davis: Yeah. It brings to attention some of the interesting issues. A lot of the complaints about ChatGPT and related products have been that they hallucinate that the things that they spout so confidently aren't facts. Which I think has been a warning sign for a lot of people.

But it is also true that the perspective of an individual creator is also not necessarily a fact. So I'm curious to hear your perspective on two angles. One is the ability to take a creator's perspective and actually [00:06:00] represent that faithfully. Like how do you ground your technology in the actual perspective of creators and how do you feel about creators being obligated to be truthful?

For instance, fake news. Like what's the, what are the risks or maybe down the line for how Meebo could be a voice of people who you don't necessarily want to expand their voice.

Avi Fein: Yeah.

I'll go in reverse order because I think the first question is almost like the harder question than the second one, at least for us. On the second one, and this connects with the idea of like, how do you not think of the world as being a generic monolith of information that we all trust in that we're not trying to give you an opinion around what is fact and what is not fact in the world.

By virtue of talking with an individual, you are establishing that you trust them, or at least like you like, like they're their source of knowledge and they're the source of information, not us. And having worked in this space before, at least at like Neeva and seeing some of these [00:07:00] dynamics and that one of the drawbacks of the, of those types of products is that trust is inferred into the brand such that I trust the first result on Google because Google said it's the first result.

And the actual sourcing of the individual things that like go into it, start to fade away and not matter anymore. And then Google becomes responsible for moderating the internet. And then Twitter becomes responsible for moderating Twitter. And then Instagram becomes responsible for moderating those things because trust flows up into the brand versus like staying down into the individual.

And they all say oh, that's what we, we don't want to have this responsibility, but they design the products and they build the products to, because they like, become the aggregation point and become the, they come the center point to do that. And for us I think it is about not meddling too much into those worlds and letting the individual points of view, the individual facts still sit where they like lay. Like we're not gonna strip it out like of someone's chatbot just because we may disagree with it. Because you on the other side are an [00:08:00] adult and like we trust that you will be able to form your own point of view on whether you can have that trust with that person or not. And that's the complexity of life and I think the reality of it.

On the first part of how do you actually do a good job of this? That's like the long arc of technology and I don't want to claim that like after three or four months we've solved some massive problem and be like, ah, guys, like this is done.

Like we we've done it here. What I can say that we lean into and we think give us tailwinds to be able to tackle this number one is that we come from a background in search. And what that means is that we spend a lot more time and energy and effort into. Retrieval as being like an important problem and understanding what are the facts or what are the opinions, or what are the things that this person has said and how do we like, make sure we're relying on that.

And what that does is it gives you a boundary in terms of the AI and what it like when you are generating a response or when you are trying to [00:09:00] Yeah, like generate like leverage that you can know apriori how far you may be deviating from what that person has said before. So imagine like when it comes in, you have now GPT3 where you give it a prompt, and when you're assembling that prompt, you could say this person has Neevaer said anything about this topic before. Or like they've said something, 20% about this topic, 80% about this topic, 70% about this topic.

You can at least now have like thresholds to say they have not talked enough about this to really give a response and just be like, I'm sorry I can't answer your question. For example, and that's like a very simplistic I think approach to it. But in concept, I think once you have a source domain that is like boundary incense on it you can apply some of these techniques to.

Not let the model hallucinate or at least know when you're hallucinating more.

John McDonnell: I do wanna double click on something here around these recommendations because you worked previously at Google, YouTube, and Neeva. And one thing that I've always found so these platforms do end up becoming editorial and I've actually always found that YouTube seems to have the [00:10:00] most wholesome recommendations relative to other platforms.

I find that like when I get recommended things on YouTube, they're often educational or interesting and relevant to my interests, but not in a perverse way. Whereas, say TikTok is clearly just trying to addict me to their platform which is fun, but doesn't necessarily feel as wholesome.

Why is that?

Bryan Davis: Or perhaps how could that differentiated experience be created?

Avi Fein: Yeah, no I love this question and I love YouTube And I feel the same way. I think that's like definitely a very true observation with insight into it. If I had to speculate on the potential reasons for it, I would guess it relates to both the product definition of long form video itself.

And then also monetization and how those relate to why this, like maybe manifestation of it. One is that I think more nutritious edu educational content is hard to make bite size. And it is better in like a long form format. And I would also say, I would also guess intuitively that the people who want that type of [00:11:00] content don't want it to be like overly reductive and to be like this like hot take TikTok type of thing, where it's no, they're interested in going deep and actually like learning about this thing which is not well suited to those short form bite size types of.

Like platforms. And so I think there's just a natural product definition that causes more of those things to flow into a YouTube or it's a better fit for both the audience who like want to engage with it. And for the content itself in many ways. I think the second reason for monetization is that outside of YouTube, it's actually very hard to make a living generating content on TikTok or Instagram. They're just not the same type of monetization engine for creators as like YouTube is. That's largely related to both. YouTube's an amazing monetization engine of like they can Make billions and billions of dollars of advertising. But they also share all of that with these creators.

And if you take the power of Google's advertising machine and then you [00:12:00] give 50% of that, not exactly, but roughly 50% of that out to creators. You're sharing a lot of wealth and they have, they show more wealth with creators than any other platform by far. What that also means is, Some of these things which are less popular and less like mainstream, like educational informational things are, can survive and make a living on YouTube where they really can On TikTok or Instagram, if you are like an info entertainer, nutritious content creator you really aren't gonna make a living on TikTok or Instagram.

You'll probably do it for a few months and then realize how hard it is and how much it's just like running up Mount Everest effectively and probably burn out and not do it, and fade away. We're on YouTube. You can find your niche and you can find that audience because of the platform, be, and then be able to make money that comes back to you on it to reinvest and actually have a content business that like comes out of it.

Good.

Bryan Davis: What a, what allows for YouTube to be that platform in a way that Instagram is not. Both of them have enormously high user counts. I would imagine that the kind of number of crevices and interests that one can [00:13:00] fall into are just as deep on all of these platforms. What do you think makes YouTube distinct?

Avi Fein: In terms of its monetization, you mean?

Bryan Davis: Or if it's, I guess its ability. Yeah. One thing, it sounds like one of the biggest differentiators is the ability to make