mar 7, 2017 - Birth of Replika: An AI Friend Rooted in Grief

Description:

In 2017, Luka Inc., a company initially specializing in chatbot services such as restaurant recommendations, launched a new app: Replika, an AI companion designed to offer supportive, empathetic dialogue.

The inspiration for Replika came from a deeply personal loss. In 2015, co-founder Eugenia Kuyda lost her close friend Roman Mazurenko. Seeking to preserve his memory, she created a chatbot that could simulate conversations with him using his old text messages. This experiment revealed the profound emotional potential of AI technology.

Early versions of Replika featured a symbolic "egg" that would grow and evolve as it learned about the user, becoming a digital version of themselves, hence the name. The app's minimalist, text-based interface, styled like a typical messaging app, emphasized intimacy and clear communication.

The datasets for training Replika were
- Twitter — 50M dialogs (consecutive tweet-reply turns) from a twitter stream for a training models from scratch
- User’s logs (anonymised) with reactions (likes / dislikes) — millions of messages with thousands reactions at daily average
- Amazon Mechanical Turk — quality assessments and small amounts of training data (it’s pricey)
- Replika context-free — small public dialog dataset available at https://github.com/lukalabs

Official statements:
https://medium.com/%40replika/replika-ai-to-launch-on-the-app-store-3b673f26423b
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JztwE68gwc
https://medium.com/@replika/hello-world-222456a3e3e
https://github.com/lukalabs/replika-research/blob/master/scai2017/replika_ai.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQGqMVuAk04&ab_channel=Quartz

Replika's early interface:
https://youtu.be/h80FGmfCJiY?si=y0CkEOWFC-qAxoOy
https://github.com/lukalabs/replika-research/blob/master/scai2017/replika_ai.pdf

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