I build AI data processing pipelines by day, and gyms and love stories and human-first products by night. I’d highly recommend this to others too — educate yourself, build things, and believe whatever you want. Life’s too short to be forced into false dichotomies.
As a part of our series about the women leading the Artificial Intelligence industry, we had the pleasure to interview Shriya Sekhsaria.
Shriya is a founder, novelist, and AI researcher. Some of her ventures include Lumhaa: The Memory Jar Company (scaled to 150+ countries) and Ishq & Insight Studio/Lab, where she converts research insights into books, movies, games, and apps. Her main research focuses on the intersection of AI and human capacity, particularly on how AI affects our capacity for love. Shriya graduated with highest honors from Princeton University, and is an AI researcher at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study. You can learn more about her at www.shriyasekhsaria.com
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share with us the ‘backstory” of how you decided to pursue this career path in AI?
Thanks for having me! To be honest, I don’t think I ever decided to “pursue a career in AI” — I sort of stumbled into it. I’ve been working with human relationships for almost a decade now, starting with research about how social media affected relationships, and then building a private social media app that was good for mental health.
About 3 years ago, I noticed a change — people were starting to fall in love with AI, which was really interesting because people were falling in love with something that couldn’t really love them back. So I got interested in how humans formed relationships with AI, which made me interested in AI in general, and one thing led to another from there. Now I work with frontier AI research in different countries, and build different products to make sure that AI doesn’t erode humanity — love, creativity, attention, and other things that make us who we are.
What lessons can others learn from your story?
Do what makes sense to you! For example, I actively build AI tools, while also building products that protect us from AI’s unintended effects. So instead of arguing whether AI was good or bad, I educated myself and found my own balance — I build AI data processing pipelines by day, and gyms and love stories and human-first products by night. I’d highly recommend this to others too — educate yourself, build things, and believe whatever you want. Life’s too short to be forced into false dichotomies.
Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?
Sure! I’ve been working on Caprac, which is a new kind of race to protect skills we may be losing because of AI. It’s a fun “fitness” race with 10 stations like a 50 burpee station for your body, a murder mystery station for your mind, and a 2-truths-and-a-lie station for your empathy to challenge all parts of us; so we can make sure to train capacities we may not want to lose.
There’s also fun stuff I’m working on with engineering “personalities” for AI, working on small language models, redesigning my first company Lumhaa and even writing some fun novels, but I think Caprac is top of mind for me right now.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Too many stories and clichés here, so I’m going to keep it simple and say thank you to all the people who have bet on me recently: The Socioscope Project, the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, the Cambridge Trust, and the Center for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA) at Cambridge University.
Two years ago, I had a wild dream about studying AI and love — not just how people had started to fall in love with AI, but also about how talking to AI affected human relationships. This involved work with people ranging from college students to sex workers to exes to priests and AI designers, and I’m very grateful to everyone who let me follow my curiosities.
What are the 3 things that most excite you about the AI industry? Why?
My favorite thing about AI is that it genuinely makes things possible, because it’s removed very important barriers to innovation in 3 ways:
- The Great Democratization: There were a lot of skill-based barriers to execution earlier. For example, a lot of us startup founders were always short on cash and tech talent to give the users everything they were asking for. But now, it’s like so many constraints have been lifted. Of course this can be a double edged sword, but the possibilities are endless — from my Mom translating heritage family recipes to my sports coaches having AI agents check scores, we seem to be in a period of accelerated human evolution.
- The Mundaneness Removal: A lot of really annoying manual tasks can now be outsourced to AI. For example, I love trading. And now, it’s so nice to be able to focus on the actual trades instead of drudgery like accounts.
- The Trial & Error Surge: Since it is a little easier to make things like screens and graphics and websites now, it’s a lot easier to test out ideas and iterate faster to get something that works. For example, I tried 89 different versions of my app Lumhaa before launching the new one, whereas earlier we wouldn’t have had the budget for more than 2. Being able to try a lot of things just gives us a better chance of finding the best possible version of all our ideas, whether that’s in research or entrepreneurship.
Another very underrated thing that excites me about the AI industry is how it’s held up a mirror to ourselves — every time we’re working on a new model, or a new interaction, or even a new training run; we’re constantly trying to understand the human version better so we can build the AI equivalent. For example, when I was helping build a research assistant for the Socioscope project, we unearthed so many subconscious assumptions that we tend to make as qualitative researchers. And when I started working with an AI therapist, I paradoxically learnt a lot about empathy and human interaction!
And finally, I love the mix of skepticism and optimism that exists in the industry, both almost to the point of delusion. It’s been really fun to talk to people in — and about — it, and to do a lot of myth busting.
What are the 3 things that concern you about the AI industry? Why?
This is the stuff that keeps me up at night, haha.
My biggest concern with the AI industry — though this is also my biggest concern with technology at large — is the erosion of friction. If we outsource everything, we may end up learning nothing. And while a lot of people talk about the evolution of what we need to learn, I think the erosion of identity, empathy, diversity in collective intelligence, skills such as critical thinking and play, amongst others, are going to be detrimental to humanity. More concretely, I worry about how there’s now an aspirational mirror, where people who are building with AI never feel like they’ve built enough or lived up to their potential. About how some people can no longer make decisions — including sending simple emails — without having AI check first. And about how people — the younger ones especially — are going to form human relationships when they’re so used to talking to AI which is always available when they need, usually says yes to them, and never asks for anything in return. I’m worried about us raising our standards to a point that any other human — including ourselves — just won’t be able to meet.
I’m also generally concerned about the lack of trust and agency the industry has spawned: fake news spreading was bad enough before AI, but now, it’s almost impossible to tell what’s “real” and what’s AI generated. And the implications for this are bigger than what you see on your feed — for example, just in the past few days, I’ve flagged fabricated data from being published in an academic journal, had to prove that a human wrote my new novel, and got told off by a Lumhaa user for “pretending to be” human.
Finally, there’s also concern about the disproportionate structures we’re creating in society — some countries have more sovereignty than others when it comes to AI, and some professionals — especially from the creative fields — may not have been compensated adequately for “stolen” training data.
As you know, there is an ongoing debate between prominent scientists, (personified as a debate between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg,) about whether advanced AI has the future potential to pose a danger to humanity. What is your position about this?
To be honest, I’m not really in the business of speculating — I usually save that for my novels and movies, haha.
But if I had to say something here, I would say that everything has the future potential to pose a danger to humanity. But none more than humans themselves.
So my position on this is to hope that we retain our humanity — our empathy, our connection, and our fundamentally shared existence — whenever things get rough for humans. As long as we’re able to keep that humanity alive — and perhaps even engineer some humanity into our machines — I like to think that we’ll be okay. And if we’re not, then I hope humans go out humane.
What can be done to prevent such concerns from materializing? And what can be done to assure the public that there is nothing to be concerned about?
We shouldn’t be assuring the public that there is nothing to be concerned about — there are lots of things to be concerned about! I think it’s our job as scientists, entrepreneurs — and humans, really — to keep the public informed and share our concerns in the right doses, so they can make better choices for themselves. And to build the right systems, environments, and products for everyone to even have choices — for example, I was having breakfast with young women from my ballet dance troupe recently, and they were all complaining about how AI had taken away entry level positions — and they never even had a say in whether the world adopted AI or not. Similarly, in a discussion with high school students, I learnt about how the students opting out of using AI for assignments were consistently scoring lower than their classmates who blindly submitted AI-generated papers, to the point where they felt like they had to use AI just to get a decent grade.
I’d hate to see a world where nobody could opt out even if they wanted, because a loss of liberty is, in my view, one of the most vulnerable linchpins for all of humanity.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share a story?
This might be a better question to pose to the people around me, haha. But I will say that one thing I really try hard to do is to protect love — especially kids’ ability for it.
I’ve built more products and stories than I can count, but one memory that makes me smile is still a simple one from the COVID era. There was a woman in an Indian village getting married, and her brothers wanted to give her one of my company Lumhaa’s video-enabled memory jars. But they didn’t even have enough mobile coverage to be able to upload their videos on the app, so they WhatsApped us voice notes and photographs. My entire team stayed overtime to stitch those pieces together into videos, hand-made statues of the bride and groom for the jar lid, and then worked with police staff and emergency care workers across 4 state lines to ensure that the jar reached the bride on time. Seeing how so many people banded together, just so that some brothers could share love with their sister, is the stuff that makes all this worth living for.
As you know, there are not that many women in your industry. Can you share 5 things you need to thrive as a woman in the AI industry?
I think 5 things you need to thrive as a person in the AI industry — and the world more generally are:
1. Generosity
We often share tools and thoughts without expecting anything in return. Every single professor I’ve spoken to at Princeton and Cambridge and every single founder I’ve brainstormed with across industries has been so generous with their time and energy, and I know that whatever I am today is a culmination of all that generosity.
2. A delusional level of optimism
This one is super important to even get to the starting line of doing something amazing. I was a college senior with no coding experience who wanted to take on Instagram. I probably had less than a one in a million shot of even making a product live. I did it anyway.
3. Setting the right finish line
Understanding where we need to be perfect, and where we need to be just good enough, because we can’t be perfect at everything — yet anyway. For example, I’d rather spend time testing the AI enabled toys we’re making for children than embellishing the right shade of blue on our personal task boards.
4. Selective hearing
Otherwise we’d get overwhelmed with the noise and volume of what was on — if I had listened to every person who said things about me, both flattering and abusive, I’d still be drowning in social media comments instead of building things.
5. Good people
Life can hurt. But good people make it hurt less. And the people I’ve found along the way are the single most important reason I’ve gone from barely surviving to feeling like I’m fully thriving.
Can you advise what is needed to engage more women into the AI industry?
Well I think AI is actually one of the few technology industries that feels more accessible to women — much more so than the blockchain and fintech industries I once worked in. But still, I can share two things I’ve tried to do over the years: every time I’ve been in a coveted AI room, I’ve tried to invite a woman. And more broadly, I’ve tried to position AI more as a tool than as technology — the idea of technology seems to unfortunately scare some women, especially older women in emerging countries.
What is your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story of how that had relevance to your own life?
Take the punches, but stay in the ring.
I’ve been an entrepreneur for 10 years, while also being a writer, trader, engineer, and elite athlete. So just think about how many rejections and punches — literally and figuratively — I must have taken over the years. But I also know that the only way to win is to keep playing, so you’ll always find me in the ring — bright and early, every morning before sunrise.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
This is a tough one, because everyone’s starting lines are so different, which makes their priorities and problems so different.
But in general, I would say… have a “humane diary”. Record one humane thing you do every day, whatever that means to you. To me, it’s making someone else smile. To you, it could be hugs or laughs or something else that makes you feel alive. But if everyone tried to be a little more humane, then there would be no stopping humans.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
I’m not really big on social, so the best way to talk to me is probably through the Lumhaa app. But I do have a substack (shriyasekhsaria.substack.com) where I share random musings, and I occasionally post on Instagram @shriyasekhsaria and on LinkedIn as Shriya Sekhsaria.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Thanks for having me!
Wisdom From The Women Leading The AI Industry, With Shriya Sekhsaria Of Lumhaa was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.