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On today’s Product Hunt leaderboard, #2 is pretty interesting: an AI-powered Santa you can talk to. Essentially, you can enable your camera and mic and have a conversation with him. The goal of the conversation is to end up being categorized as Naughty or Nice, and there is a meter that changes based on your answers to Santa’s questions. If he thinks an answer leads you to being nice, you’ll move farther in that direction. If you give a naughty answer, it will go the opposite way. The experience is powered by Tavus, a video API for digital twins.

What It Implies

What’s most fascinating to me about this tech is that I can have a real conversation with Santa. He can hear me, think about what to say next, and generally say the right thing. It’s pretty cool, even though this tech is not necessarily brand new. Now, I don’t care too much for Santa, but what if it was my favorite football player? Or a DJ that I like? Hell, what if it was someone who wasn’t alive anymore? I might find I would have more of a connection to this conversation.

Where it gets interesting is: what if there are people feeding data into the AI to make it better and more accurate? What if the AI took interesting things I told it and relayed them to the actual person the AI is resembling? What if, in 20 years, when we all have a Neuralink in our brains, creating an AI that exactly resembles who we are—what we think, and how we talk—was as easy as making an API call? That’s what makes this particularly compelling to me.

Today, it’s a fun little way to chat with Santa. Tomorrow, I might be interviewed by Marc Andreessen’s clone to earn the right to chat with Marc about a role at a16z. Maybe this is the new resume. Maybe this is the digital bouncer to virtual communities. There is a lot to think about. Thanks for starting the conversation, Santa.