Replika’s founder built the AI assistant she pitched at Disrupt 12 years ago

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Twelve years ago today, Eugenia Kuyda stood up onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt and presented a conversational chatbot called IO that acted as a lifestyle concierge to help people book restaurants and vacations along with other tasks. IO, the first product from her startup Luka, came before the deep learning breakthroughs that would eventually lead to today’s large language models. “It still worked,” Kuyda told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “It was pretty magical … but, of course, it’s nowhere near what we have today.”

十二年前的今天，尤金妮亚·库伊达（Eugenia Kuyda）站在 TechCrunch Disrupt 的舞台上，展示了一款名为 IO 的对话式聊天机器人。它充当生活方式管家，帮助人们预订餐厅、度假以及处理其他任务。IO 是她创办的初创公司 Luka 推出的首款产品，早于后来引领当今大语言模型的深度学习突破。“它当时确实能用，”库伊达在接受 TechCrunch 独家采访时表示，“这非常神奇……但当然，它与我们今天所拥有的技术相去甚远。”

Luka ended up becoming Replika, the popular AI chatbot companion company. Last year, Kuyda left as CEO of Replika and founded Wabi. The technology has finally caught up with her original vision for Luka, just in time for Wabi to take on a wave of new personal AI assistants such as Muse and Instinct, which promise to do everything from manage your inbox to find you the best flight deals.

Luka 最终演变成了广受欢迎的 AI 聊天机器人伴侣公司 Replika。去年，库伊达卸任 Replika 首席执行官并创立了 Wabi。这项技术终于赶上了她最初对 Luka 的愿景，Wabi 也恰逢其时地加入了一波新型个人 AI 助手的竞争浪潮，如 Muse 和 Instinct，这些助手承诺能处理从管理收件箱到寻找最佳航班优惠等一切事务。

On Monday, Kuyda officially launched Wabi for all users, a multiplayer personal AI assistant that functions as a messenger app, allowing users to maintain multiple agentic threads dedicated to different tasks and long-term goals. Within each thread, users can build and use custom apps, like a weight-loss tracker inside a health thread or an app showing nearby children’s events inside a family thread.

周一，库伊达正式向所有用户推出了 Wabi。这是一款多人协作的个人 AI 助手，其功能类似于即时通讯应用，允许用户维护多个专门针对不同任务和长期目标的代理线程。在每个线程中，用户可以构建并使用自定义应用程序，例如在健康线程中添加体重追踪器，或在家庭线程中添加显示附近儿童活动的应用程序。

The launch is something of a pivot for Wabi, though Kuyda describes it as more of an evolution. When TechCrunch covered Wabi’s initial launch last year, along with its $20 million pre-seed round, it was described as more of a social platform where you could create mini apps with prompts that you could share with friends or across the app. Over the past year, Kuyda said the team realized that while people love personal software rather than “one size fits all solutions in the App Store,” they “maybe don’t want to spend a lot of time, or any time, building it.”

此次发布对 Wabi 而言算是一种转型，尽管库伊达将其描述为一种演进。当 TechCrunch 去年报道 Wabi 的首次发布及其 2000 万美元的种子轮融资时，它被描述为一个社交平台，用户可以通过提示词创建小程序，并与朋友或在应用内分享。库伊达表示，在过去的一年里，团队意识到，虽然人们喜欢个性化软件，而不是应用商店里“千篇一律的解决方案”，但他们“可能不想花太多时间，甚至根本不想花时间去构建它”。

With Wabi 2.0, the agent decides what apps to build. The moment you connect it to your email, it automatically spins up a number of threads and apps to start with, and users can add to that by requesting custom apps or starting new threads. “It’s doing what Instinct and Muse do, but it also has all these apps, which helps users do more stuff,” Kuyda said.

在 Wabi 2.0 中，由代理决定构建哪些应用程序。当你将其连接到电子邮件时，它会自动启动多个线程和应用程序作为起点，用户可以通过请求自定义应用程序或开启新线程来增加功能。“它不仅能做 Instinct 和 Muse 能做的事，还拥有所有这些应用程序，这有助于用户完成更多任务，”库伊达说。

App-building isn’t Wabi’s only differentiator. Kuyda is also betting on its multithreaded, multiplayer design. “It’s not just everything in one single thread like with Instinct and Muse, where you get buried in the information that it sends you every day,” Kuyda said. “Single thread experiences, if you think about it, get worse over time because it’s just so much context in one endless conversation.”

构建应用并不是 Wabi 唯一的差异化优势。库伊达还押注于其多线程、多人协作的设计。“它不像 Instinct 和 Muse 那样将所有内容集中在一个线程中，导致你被每天发送的信息淹没，”库伊达说，“如果你仔细想想，单线程体验会随着时间的推移而变差，因为在一个无休止的对话中包含的信息量太大了。”

The longer an AI chatbot conversation goes on, the more likely it is to hallucinate, lose track of context, or respond in ways that would otherwise be blocked by safety guardrails, according to interviews with AI researchers. Threads can also be shared, functioning as group chats. “Today, all the agentic apps are just [conversations] between you and the agent, and I feel like it should be a lot more about bringing people together in a group chat together,” Kuyda said.

根据对 AI 研究人员的采访，AI 聊天机器人的对话持续时间越长，就越容易产生幻觉、丢失上下文，或以本应被安全护栏拦截的方式进行回复。线程也可以共享，作为群聊使用。“如今，所有的代理应用都只是你和代理之间的对话，我觉得它应该更多地关注于通过群聊将人们聚集在一起，”库伊达说。

Kuyda walked TechCrunch through some of her own shared threads. In one with her boyfriend, a row of apps along the top helps the two of them connect and find things to do together, including a live music tracker, an app that asks a question every day about their relationship, a running list of restaurant suggestions, important events from their shared calendar, and a list of books they’re reading together with suggestions for what to read next.

库伊达向 TechCrunch 展示了她自己的一些共享线程。在她与男友的一个线程中，顶部的一排应用程序帮助两人建立联系并寻找共同活动，包括现场音乐追踪器、每天询问关于他们关系问题的应用、餐厅建议列表、共享日历中的重要事件，以及他们共同阅读的书籍列表和后续阅读建议。

In her more family-focused thread, there is an app tracking her daughter’s schedule, another for finding kid-friendly events nearby, and another that quizzes her daughter on Japanese. Within any shared chat, users can share as much or as little as they want, from email and calendar information to bank account details. “So my partner can ask Wabi in the chat, ‘Is Eugenia free next Thursday?’ or ‘Did she buy those tickets?’” Kuyda said.

在她更侧重家庭的线程中，有一个追踪她女儿日程的应用程序，另一个用于寻找附近适合儿童的活动，还有一个用于测试她女儿日语水平的应用。在任何共享聊天中，用户可以根据需要分享信息，从电子邮件和日历信息到银行账户详情。“所以我的伴侣可以在聊天中问 Wabi：‘尤金妮亚下周四有空吗？’或者‘她买那些票了吗？’”库伊达说。

She noted that access is scoped to individual chats, and everyone in a chat can see when someone’s personal information is requested. On privacy more broadly, Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, meaning its data security controls have been independently audited. Wabi runs entirely in the cloud, and most user data is stored in the U.S., Kuyda said.

她指出，访问权限仅限于单个聊天，聊天中的每个人都能看到何时有人请求个人信息。在更广泛的隐私方面，Wabi 符合 SOC 2 标准，这意味着其数据安全控制已通过独立审计。库伊达表示，Wabi 完全在云端运行，大多数用户数据存储在美国。

“My previous company Replika worked on AI that will make people feel … less lonely,” Kuyda said. “To a degree, that is [in Wabi] as well. AI can bring people together, even when it comes to just helping you spend time better together in real life, whether it’s going out and seeing a concert together or finding the next book that you will read together.” Wabi is free for now, and the company hasn’t settled on a business model yet. Kuyda said Wabi is in talks to raise more funds.

“我之前的公司 Replika 致力于开发能让人感到……不那么孤独的 AI，”库伊达说，“在某种程度上，Wabi 也是如此。AI 可以将人们联系在一起，即使只是帮助你们在现实生活中更好地共度时光，无论是共同去看一场音乐会，还是寻找下一本要一起读的书。”Wabi 目前免费，公司尚未确定商业模式。库伊达表示，Wabi 正在商谈筹集更多资金。