Ravikant said Airchat received most of its funding from his own fund, as well as from Accomplice Ventures founding partner Jeff Fagnan. “[OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman threw a check, kind of blindly,” Ravikant said. After politely declining to reply to my private messages and insisting that our conversation should take place in public, he said on Airchat All this information was conveyed to me in his public response: “This cannot be a DM-based side interview. This is the old world we’re leaving behind,” he told me. (In the old world, as in the new, doing interviews simultaneously was almost always…better.)
So far, the Airchat feed seems to be filled with tech enthusiasts, early adopters, venture capitalists, and journalists. There are a lot of Bitcoin posts. Wine influencer Gary Vaynerchuk is using the app. So does Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. This weekend, Tan posted: “Breakfast is the first step to greatness. What did you eat this morning?” It has more than 96 audio responses so far. Social media is back, baby.
Airchat has artificial intelligence. What’s not allowed? However, the application is very smartly deployed.Transcripts for each Airchat voice note appear almost immediately, and they are OK. The pronunciation “Ums” appears in the transcription, but other slight pauses and filler words were removed. When I use the word “Airchat” in a voice note, it first appears as “Bad Chat” and then quickly corrects itself. The app appears to be able to recognize and transcribe other languages as well; one user spoke in Russian, with the transcript displayed in Cyrillic, while another spoke in Moroccan Arabic (called darija), with subsequent voice annotations I am amazed at the excellence of written records.
So what happens to all this voice data? Ravikant claimed that Airchat’s creators had no intention of training large language models based on users’ voices and making “weird synthetic clones.” He also said he would not sell Airchat data to another company building an artificial intelligence model, especially given that the app is relatively small and its data is unclassified. However, Airchat may use people’s speech data to train models to improve its own audio and transcription features. If you join, you have chosen to join.
I asked Ravikant whether it’s still possible for some AI companies to scrape Airchat data without a formal agreement. He responded: “We’ll stop them, we’ll prosecute them, and then, if I have a fleet of orbiting satellites, we’ll blow them out of orbit.”
Airchat’s monetization plans are less clear. Navicant did not disclose any information about access charges. The current format seems fine for audio ads, but there’s always the risk of making the app unlistenable.
When people release virtual microphones, unfiltered sound bytes are posted to the timeline, which also presents content moderation issues. On Sunday, one troll seemed to push its boundaries, cursing out the app’s founder, calling the app “fucking garbage,” and telling the founder, in as many words, to, uh, perform oral sex. Voice prompts are still present. So did a post in which two users went back and forth telling stories about a “gay Jewish teen” and a “neo-Nazi killer.”