Hume CEO Alan Cowen on Creating Emotionally Aware AI

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
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**Alan Cowen** (0:45)
Already with a pre-existing knowledge that gets it to well beyond human level, it should be way better than any human on earth at understanding emotional affordances, just from the start because it's already learned from way more data than any human on earth has seen, that informs our understanding of emotional affordances in everyday interactions. The ideal is that it is better at predicting how an action affects human well-being, than the degree to which it will result in your bank account having a higher number, like things like that. Because predicting well-being is a matter of predicting people's emotional expressions, their reactions, their states over long time scales, and that data exists. I think there's a path forward.
I'm very much worried about it, but I'm also optimistic that we can solve the problem.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:30)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today my guest is Alan Cowen, CEO and Chief Scientist at Hume AI, a research lab and technology company that describes itself as teaching AI to make people happy, and thus paving the way for pro-social AI. Now, if you've read your science fiction, or even just studied the many challenges associated with the use of RLHF training to shape AI behavior, you'll immediately recognize that the interplay between human emotions and increasingly capable AI systems raises all sorts of profound questions. How do we know that we're accurately measuring human emotion, particularly across diverse populations and cultural contexts? Exactly what emotional response should we be optimizing for? How do we understand the relationship and trade-offs between short-term happiness and long-term well-being? And how do we maintain high-level control as AI systems begin to access not just our verbal and facial responses, but our brain states directly, potentially coming to understand us better in some ways than we understand ourselves?
Such scenarios are no longer all that far-fetched, but in keeping with my general philosophy of trying to figure out what is before attempting to determine what we can do about it, I spent most of my time with Alan digging into the details of how he and the Hume team have built their platform, exploring the challenges inherent in collecting emotional response data and their approaches to overcoming them, delving into the nature of emotional measurement models that they've built for text, image, audio, and video, and understanding how they productize all this technology for customers today, before finally zooming out to consider the big picture Big picture at the end.
It's no exaggeration in my mind to say that the development of emotionally aware AI is one of the highest stakes parts of the broader cognitive revolution. And I came away from this conversation very impressed not only with the technology that Hume has built, but also by the depth and quality of thought that Alan and team have put into their approach. You can see the technology in action by watching the video version of this episode, on top of which we'll be layering real-time output from Hume's emotion recognition API. And you can also dig deeper into their philosophy at thehumeinitiative.org. The work there, of course, is nowhere near finished, but already they have established a 10-member ethics committee, developed six guiding principles for empathic AI, published best practices for measuring well-being across low, medium, and high-risk use cases, and articulated a list of both supported and unsupported use cases.
As always, if you're finding value in the show, we ask that you take a moment to share it with friends. And of course, we always appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Now, here is a deeply thought-provoking conversation with Alan Cowen of emotional intelligence startup Hume AI. Alan Cowen of Hume AI, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.