# Interview #87 Vishnu Hari, CEO of ego AI

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-artificial-intelligence-podcast-3635848/interview-87-vishnu-hari-ceo-of-ego-ai
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-artificial-intelligence-podcast-3635848/interview-87-vishnu-hari-ceo-of-ego-ai.md
Podcast: [The Artificial Intelligence Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-artificial-intelligence-podcast-3635848)
Published: 2026-05-25T23:46:25+00:00
Episode link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tonyphoang/episodes/Interview-87-Vishnu-Hari--CEO-of-ego-AI-e3jsvng
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO7796488379.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-artificial-intelligence-podcast-3635848/episodes/interview-87-vishnu-hari-ceo-of-ego-ai
Duration seconds: 1149

## Resource

Vishnu Hari, CEO of Ego AI, breaks down why the labs with billions in compute missed the product hiding in plain sight: character AI quietly tops every consumer retention leaderboard while the serious labs write it off as a sideshow. He argues humanness itself is the hard problem - dangerous, uncontrollable, and unchained - so the giants retreat to safe coding agents and ship characters that collapse into therapy or role-play because they never actually live lives. Vishnu takes apart the memory paradox (an agent that remembers everything is unusable; one that remembers nothing is forgettable) and points to the Nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor, a feature so good Warner Bros trademarked it, as proof you can build real relationships without superintelligence. He also gets into the edges no one wants to touch: who inherits the AI you've talked to for a decade, and why the new "I'm not human" disclosure laws are pure theater.

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## Transcript

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