Pika's Demi Guo launches 'AI Selves' — a personalized always-on avatar that learns and monetizes your expertise

will kick off our Lambda Lightning round. I'm getting it, Ben. We got new graphics. The Lambda Lightning round has been

We have Demi Gu from Pika. She's the co-founder and CEO. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing?

Thank you so much for coming back on the show. Uh fired up.

Tell us about AI selves. Tell us about the latest launch. What did you launch today?

Yeah, for sure. Um so we all have the same problem. you know, there's only one of us.

Your mom needs, you know, help with your computer. Your your partner sometime wants, you know, more time, especially for a founder. Your friends want to hang out. You know, you're a founder, you're so busy that maybe you're missing out for like a group, group trip planning, but uh you're in the meetings or on flights or asleep. Mh.

So then we raise this question like what if there's a second you

u we build something you know um new which is called AI self where you can give birth to it you can raise it um and it will grow with you you know you both and it becomes a living extension of you.

This is what you and John Bulmer were just talking about two hours earlier in the show. You're like John and Jordy are going to talk to each other and get stuff done. Is this purely for entertainment or do you actually see a a business sort of use case where uh someone with a great marketing mind will create an AI self and then uh I would be able to go to them and bounce a a Super Bowl ad campaign off of them. How do you see the user actually interacting with this?

Yeah, for sure. I think there are many ways you can do it. Uh first, like it definitely uh it's it's you but it's always like you mentioned it's like infinite availability, right? So

247 available always on can be everywhere.

Um so you know your family mom people who love you will be able to have more access to you. So your mom will be able to like talk to AI self to help her to debug it problems. But like you mentioned it's same for you know people who are have great expertise right so like if you're a really genius marketing person maybe like uh other people can talk to her to gain more import more marketing um knowledge and she can monetize off it

um and um and it's because it's AI so it can do all those like it's like it breaks all the human limits right so it can be very capable for example like I mentioned like uh it can your marketing taste, but it also can do everything like 10 times faster.

How do you how do you get enough data for an individual to make it an accurate representation of the individual? We've we've talked about this because we put out three hours a day of content of ourselves talking, hanging out. Uh but most most people uh don't have

we're going 247 with this. Let the AI selves host the rest of the other 21 hours a day.

Yeah, for sure. Like yeah, the whole thing sure you guys can use your AI self to directly give

this is it. This is it.

So yeah, but uh to answer a question about how do we get data to have accurate representation of you? I would say there are like three three angles like first is um it it could import more data of you. So for example, you can like import all the CBM show in the past. Um so you can learn from that. Um but also like when you're using AI self you can there's this constant process like um you're correcting and guiding it right so when you're using using her you know to for him to like generate marketing assets for you uh she he will also learn the marketing taste you have. Um so when you're using her for like you know short-term productive productive word um you know he will also learn the taste basically. Uh and the last angle is that the identity also really matters here. Um because for example like your mom might not care how it's 100% accurate

about like everything is accurate about you but as long as you're AI she will be interested because otherwise she could not find you right.

So yeah.

Well thank you so much for coming on. Unfortunately you have some breaking news. So I need to cut this interview short but we'll love to have you back on the show soon. So have a great rest of the day and congratulations on the launch. We'll talk to you soon.

Goodbye. And the breaking news is that Warner Brothers says Paramount's new offer is superior. Netflix now has 4 days to respond. Uh the culy market is uh continuing to diverge. Uh when we started tracking this, Netflix was up at 50%, Paramount at 40%, now Paramount is starting to run away with it. They're at 62% and Netflix is down at 33. Will they sweeten their offer? We don't know. But Netflix has four days to respond.

More breaking news.

More breaking news. What else?

Square is cutting from 10,000 to 6,000 employees. A 40% reduction.

Uh let's head over to Jack. He says, "We're making blocks smaller today. Here's my note to the company. Today we're making and I wanted to ask Howard about this because it feels like so much of I'm curious to see what Jack says around the reasoning,

but this I've been shocked that more

CEOs when their stocks are down and beat up aren't looking at what happened with X and saying we can

there's a huge expense that we have here.

Yeah.

Payroll.

And anyway, so he says today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company. We're reducing our organization by nearly half from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000.

That means 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. I'll be straight about what's happening. First off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks plus one week

per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of May, 6 months of healthcare, corporate devices, and 5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help in this transition. That uh is uh generous. Um we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. Our business is strong, gross profit continues to grow. Uh we continue to serve more customers and profitability is improving. But something has changed. We already seeing that intelligence tools we're creating and using paired with smaller and flatter teams are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company and that's accelerating rapidly. I had two options. Cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I choose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale to focus and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. And I won't read the whole thing, but uh this feels a little bit more real

like like what Satrine was sort of predicting a little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it feels more real than some of these other cuts where they do like a eight 8% rift and then say, "Oh, we're getting

but going down by nearly half."

Also, I mean, Block has been mostly spared the SAS apocalypse. I mean, the the over the last one month, the stock's down 17%, over the last six months, it's down 30%. It's not it's not, you know, down 50 60.

Yeah. But still, it's trading at like one like like somewhere around

it's way off peak. the the peak stock price was $263. Now it's at 54. And so there's certainly a question about how they build back. Well, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits