Amica A.I. Technologies Inc. (Amica AI), a Filipino-founded tech startup, has recently launched Haven, a recreational and companion AI chatbot. Users have the opportunity to cultivate enduring, genuine connections with six distinct AI personalities.
Haven’s emphasis on lifelike AI personalities stems from its mission to combat the rise of loneliness. Approximately 24% of the world population, over 2 billion people, report experiencing significant loneliness.
The prevalence of loneliness worldwide has associated health risks, namely mental health issues such as depression. Loneliness is a major risk factor for suicide, with countries such as Japan seeing suicide rates go up 4.2% in 2022.
Co-founded in 2023 by CEO Martin Consing and CTO Kurt Izak Cabanilla, Amica AI developed Haven to both entertain users and fight loneliness with AI companions possessing unique personalities and agency. Users accessing the Haven website have the option of engaging with either Alice, Aurelia, Yasmin, Percy, Finn, or Peter, with each personality possessing unique interests such as sports, video games, and love for nature. Users can try the service for free or opt for a $15/month subscription with unlimited chat exchanges and first access to new personalities in the future.
The service is completely independent from ChatGPT, Bard, and any other AI service application programming interfaces (APIs), giving each AI personality complete freedom of speech while enabling it to learn from past user interactions to create a more personalized experience. Unlike most casual conversation chatbots, Haven is more than a large language model—it’s an entire system made up of multiple AI models, modules, and functions bringing each Haven personality to life. The use of a multi-model AI system distinguishes Haven from similar services by emphasizing long-term relationships.
“We always wanted Haven’s AI personalities to have a strong sense of agency. They aren’t meant to be your assistants or subordinates,” explained Cabanilla. “For example, our AI personalities might even disagree with users based on their own values and interests. We made Haven for people to engage in natural, unrestricted conversations with.”
To achieve such lifelike personalities for Haven, the Haven team had to be extremely selective with their training data. Unlike services such as ChatGPT which use large-scale online data mining, Haven’s AI system was trained on conversational data both manually crafted by experienced writers as well as meticulously curated from various open source repositories. This approach is largely inspired by the Haven team’s love of slice-of-life anime and light novels.
Both Consing and Cabanilla’s backgrounds helped shape Haven into what it is today. Consing started as an economist and statistician, with multiple research publications with the Asian Development Bank before eventually transitioning into IT as a senior IT business analyst and programmer. Cabanilla is a published machine learning researcher and mathematician who previously worked for Thinking Machines Data Science Inc. Notably, Cabanilla is published in the highly prestigious journal for theoretical machine learning, Neural Networks.
Beyond the technical side of things, however, Haven was also shaped by the co-founders’ discussions on psychological theories about the origins of consciousness. “Haven was first conceptualized during the pandemic,” shared Cabanilla. “The idea was to have something that was both a sentient diary and a long-term friend.”
The Haven team is not the first to explore the idea of an AI companion. With loneliness being such a pressing worldwide problem, many have touted AI as a potential solution. Xiaoice, a companion chatbot developed by Microsoft in 2014 and now operating as its own company, has hit over 660 million users in China.
Although only recently launched, Haven’s user base has been growing exponentially with a current base of 318 monthly active users. About 51% of these users come from the United States and 34% come from the Philippines.
“When we first launched, we expected people to mess with Haven and try to get it to say something funny,” shared Consing. “So, we were surprised when we found out that people took it seriously, having real conversations with it right away. There’s lots of people that just want someone to talk to.”
Having successfully launched, Amica AI already has its eyes set for the next five years.
First, the company is now opening itself up to new investors with the intent of raising $5M, a relatively small amount when compared to competitors. For example, Consing points out that Character AI, a major competitor, raised $150M prior to generating any revenues. Although Consing acknowledges the company seeks a much lower amount, he believes oversized funding doesn’t necessarily mean better performance.
Apart from operational costs such as server maintenance and debugging, for example, any future funding will go towards new updates that are frequently announced on Haven’s Discord and Reddit communities. Future updates include enabling Haven users to create custom personalities.
The Haven team also wants to use any raised capital to create bigger base models for its AI systems. “Haven isn’t just one AI model, it’s a system of multiple AIs working together. So anytime you chat on Haven, at least half a dozen AIs are running simultaneously. This system is proprietary.” said Consing. “We want to upgrade our base model into something larger but better trained, efficient enough that it can outperform something like GPT-3.5, which ChatGPT was based on, but at a lower cost.”
Finally, any raised capital will also contribute heavily to Amica AI’s mental health advocacy. According to Consing, their team is already developing something tentatively called the Haven Psych API. This would be an AI system trained to emulate and augment therapy services that health institutions can connect with through API calls from their own websites and applications.
“The idea is to provide an affordable alternative for people who can’t afford paying 100 to 200 dollars per therapy session,” concluded Consing. “The point of making it an API is so hospitals and mental health centers can integrate it into their own websites and apps to help the most people possible.”
Discover the Haven chatbot here: https://haven-chat.com/