AI startup Delphi wants to bring one-on-one interactions with celebrities and influencers to the masses.
You can't be everywhere at once - can you? That's how you could describe Delphi's business model. The startup aims to model personal chatbots, i.e. make personalities chattable, from multiple data sources such as chats, emails, YouTube videos, audio files and more.
In the startup's own words, it's a "digital cloning platform that captures your thinking, making your knowledge, experiences, personality, and opinions available to others in a personalized way."
The company is still in its infancy, having raised $2.7 million so far. Technically, Delphi plans to rely on open-source models, with current projects apparently built using OpenAI technology. The trained chatbots can be integrated into websites or Slack, or even called in by phone.
One influencer, millions of conversations
The basic idea behind Delphi is to enable well-known personalities to interact with more people. The idea is not new: since the advent of successful LLMs, influencers have been trying to use personalized chatbots to create new offerings for their fans and generate additional revenue.
Delphi's success will likely depend on the technical excellence of its execution and how close the chatbot actually comes to the original. The startup has been in private beta since the beginning of the year and claims to have more than 100 chatbot creators and thousands of users.
The most prominent celebrity bots are motivational speaker Brian Tracy and music producer "Illmind," who demonstrates his offering in the video below. Illmind charges $15 per month to chat with his "digital mentor."
Otherwise, Delphi's list of sample bots primarily features entrepreneurs. A waiting list for the chatbot service is accessible via the website.
If the platform is opened up further, it would also be possible to create digital clones of other people by uploading their data. This would also make it possible to create clones of people who have already died. It is not yet clear how the startup plans to handle this on a large scale.
