Just posted to my Forbes column about a fascinating idea that could reshape how we think about artificial intelligence.
Instead of building AI that simply sounds human for a few minutes, Ego AI founder Vishnu Hari is trying to create persistent AI characters: systems that remember experiences, develop behavioral patterns, and maintain a consistent personality over time.
The idea is that real human-like interaction comes not from clever text generation but from continuity. memory, identity, and lived experience. Hari calls this the missing layer in today’s large language models, which often reset and lose context.
“It’s a human. Just look at it,” Hari told me on the TechFirst podcast.
His vision is AI that behaves like a character with its own evolving internal state, not just a tool that predicts the next word. Ego AI is experimenting with architectures that combine multiple models to manage conversation, memory, and emotional context. The result could be AI personalities that build relationships with users across games, communities, and even physical robots.