Ravikant said most of the funding for Airchat came from his own money and Accomplice Ventures founding partner Jeff Fagnan. “[OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman blindly threw the check,” Ravikant said. He relayed all of this to me via a public reply on Airchat after politely refusing to respond to my DMs and insisting that our conversation be public. “It can’t be a side-channel, DM-based interview. “That is the old world we are leaving behind,” he said. (In the old world, as in the new world, conducting simultaneous interviews is almost always… desirable.)
So far, the Airchat feed appears to be full of tech enthusiasts, early adopters, venture capitalists, and journalists. There are many posts about Bitcoin. Winefluencer Gary Vaynerchuk is on the app. The same goes for Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. This weekend Tan said, “Breakfast is the first step to greatness. “What are you eating for breakfast this morning?” There are over 96 audio responses so far. Social media is back.
AirChat has AI. What isn't? But app distribution is quietly reasonable. The contents of each Airchat voice memo are displayed almost instantly, good. The pronunciation of “Ums” appears within the transcript, but other minor pauses and supplementary words are edited out. When I used the word 'AirChat' in a voice memo, it initially displayed 'Error Chat' but quickly corrected itself. The app appears to be able to recognize and copy other languages as well. One user spoke in Russian and the transcript appeared in Cyrillic, while another spoke in Moroccan Arabic, known as darija, and was surprised by how good the transcription was in a follow-up voice note.
So what happens to all this voice data? Ravikant insisted that Airchat's creators had no intention of training large-scale language models on users' voices and creating “weird synthetic clones of yourself.” He also said he would not sell Airchat data to other companies building AI models. Especially considering that the app is relatively small and the data is unsorted. But Airchat will likely use people's voice data to train models that improve its own audio and recording capabilities. If you are participating, you have chosen to do so.
I asked Ravikant if some AI companies could still scrape Airchat data without a formal agreement. “We will block them and sue them,” he said. Then, if we have an orbital satellite battery, we will launch a nuclear weapon from orbit.”
Airchat's monetization plans are less clear. Navikant has said nothing about charging access fees. The current format seems to work well for audio ads, but there's always the risk of making your app unlistenable.
There are also content moderation issues when unfiltered sound bytes are posted to the timeline the moment people turn off their virtual microphones. One troll seemed to be pushing the envelope on Sunday, cursing out the app's creator, calling it “fucking trash” and telling the creator to perform oral sex on him. The voice memo is still there. The same goes for a thread in which two users trade stories about “gay Jewish teenagers” and “neo-Nazi murderers.”