It’s Thursday.
A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.
Some of my favorite stories are of AI founders bootstrapping their way to success. No college degree, no VC money. Just sheer grit and the right mindset.
But from time-to-time, you meet a veteran founder who was working in AI before it was cool. That’s this week’s story.
Buckle up. This one might inspire you to change course.
Trending in AI:
Nvidia’s performance props up the stock market
AI leader, Nvidia, now accounts for 7.9% of the S&P 500, making it the largest index weighting for any stock in history.
Gemini is catching up to ChatGPT
A new a16z report shows Gemini is closing the gap of total monthly users. For the first time ever, Google gained four spots on the list of top generative AI consumer web products.
Anthropic launches Claude for Chrome
The AI giant is experimenting with a browser-based AI agent to allow users to chat with Claude in a sidecar window. Users can give Claude permission to complete tasks on their behalf in their browser.
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The godfather of the AI chatbot bets big on personal AI
If you’ve ever messaged a chatbot on a website, you’ve used Robert LoCascio’s invention. His company, LivePerson, created the conversational AI chatbot interface that you see on websites like T-Mobile, Verizon, and Citibank. At its height, LivePerson had 3,000 employees and a six billion market cap.
Having played in the AI space since 2016, LoCascio had been waiting a long time for AI technology to catch up with his vision – which was to make personal AI the dominant way in which we engage with it, whether for work or personal life.
That breakout moment was 2022. LoCascio quit LivePerson to go all in on a new venture – the same year Fast Company named LivePerson as the #1 most innovative AI company in the world, ahead of OpenAI.
“We had half a billion in sales and OpenAI had nothing at the time,” LoCascio said.
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He started a company called Eternos, which creates AIs for people to replicate themselves before they die, using their proprietary human life model which replicates human knowledge. “It’s like a Tamagotchi. You feed it knowledge and it knows you better, but it’s you, not some general-purpose model,” LoCascio explained.
The launch of the company coincided with a fascinating use case. LoCascio saw a Facebook post by Michael Bommer, who used to run his European operations at LiveStream. He was terminally ill and was saying his goodbyes.
No one knew at the time LoCascio was working on Eternos, so he called Michael up and asked if he wanted to create his AI brain to preserve his legacy. Michael’s story put Eternos into mainstream media and it was full-speed from there. The model brought Michael’s wife to tears when it recalled when they first met. “I’d been in technology my whole life and I’ve never seen a human cry over something I’d created,” he said.
A famous actor with ALS is currently “banking his voice” with Eternos.
Replicate not replace
Eternos has expanded beyond preserving legacy. “We have consumers, prosumers and creators who replicate themselves and charge money for them. We have doctors, lawyers, writers, artists and even enterprises that are replicating their best employees to educate others in the company.”
It’s the raw, zero party data that’s the most powerful in creating and training AIs. “If you told me your life story, I could figure out if you lead with significance, certainty or connection. There’s a way in which you make decisions,” he explained.
The real value is in the story of your life. That story tells a lot about how you make decisions, how you reason, and what your most important needs are. We analyze all of this to understand you as a person and how you solve problems.
For example, an Eternos user was having an issue with a friend of his and he wanted advice from his AI. He put more data in around the history of the friendship, and he asked his AI brain to give him a perspective on what he should do. It didn’t have as much bias and emotion attached to it.
An enterprise use case is one of the biggest life insurance companies in the world, whose CIO saw the documentary on Michael Bommer. “He came to us saying he’d been trying to replicate his best employees but had gotten nowhere. We tested one of their best employees and now we have a larger deal to expand that across 20,000 life insurance agents in the field,” LoCascio said.
The blue ocean of personal AI
LoCascio started out self-funding Eternos, so he could go fast and build something. “We’ve just raised with one of the big VCs in Silicon Valley that we’re going to announce shortly. The business has revenue and customers across consumers, prosumers, and enterprises. We haven’t really marketed yet – all of this is inbound from Michael’s story.”
LoCascio’s story showcases how AI founders can have both the freedom to build in the early years, then get funding to accelerate growth when the time is right.

Source: eternos.life
Spotting potential: “Personal AI is going to become a space. Mark Zuckerberg just put out his strategy for their AI at Meta and it was personal superintelligence. It reads like the manifesto I have, which is about providing individuals with their own AI. Our goal with Eternos is to become a leader in personal AI. No one really owns that space.”
His go-to-market strategy? Focusing on the prosumer market, which LoCascio refers to as aggregators. “We’re working with a well-known writer who is part of a management company in Hollywood. We’re partnering with them to work with other writers that they manage.”
Targeting management companies helps them tap into an established ecosystem of creators who want to create their own AI. Given the recent ruling that AI models don’t need to pay writers for using copyrighted material in training data, Eternos provides a home for a writer to create unique AI experiences to protect and monetize themselves.
Zig when they zag: “If you’re trying to do agentic AI in the enterprise world, you’re asking for trouble. That space is so noisy and the buyers in these organizations have got large technology teams internally who have access to the same APIs from OpenAI or Claude.” A lot of people keep heading into that world, he warns.
The TLDR:
Using AI to just create a chatbot to represent a sales guy or customer support rep is shortsighted. That’s so 2016. This is a place for creativity. It allows us to get more leverage from our knowledge and be more powerful in a different framework. The narrative needs to move away from downsizing. AI is much more expansive, LoCascio believes.
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