Ravikant said the majority of Airchat’s funding came from his own funds, as well as from Jeff Fagnan, founding partner at Accomplice Ventures. “[OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman blindly threw in the check,” Ravikant said. He announced all of this to me in a public response on Airchat, after politely refusing to respond to my DMs and insisting that our conversation would take place in public. “It can’t be a direct, backchannel-based interview. That is the old world we are leaving behind,” he told me. (In the old world as in the new, it was almost always… preferable to conduct an interview synchronously.)
So far the Airchat feed seems to be filled with tech enthusiasts, early adopters, venture capitalists, and journalists. There are many posts about Bitcoin. Winefluencer Gary Vaynerchuk is on the app. So did Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. This weekend Tan posted: “Breakfast is the first step to greatness. What did you eat this morning?” So far it has more than 96 audio responses. Social media is back, baby.
Airchat has AI. What not? However, the implementation of this application is very reasonable. The audio recording for each Airchat voice note appears almost instantly and they Good. The pronounced “um” appears in the recording, but small pauses and other filler words are edited out. When I used the word “Airchat” in a voice note, it first showed up as “chat error,” then quickly corrected itself. The app also appears to be able to recognize and transcribe other languages; one user spoke in Russian and the recording appeared in Cyrillic, while another user spoke in Moroccan Arabic, known as darija, and then marveled in a subsequent voice note about Good level of transcription.
So what happens to all this voice data? Ravikant claims that Airchat’s creators did not intend to train a large language model on the user’s voice and create a “weird synthetic copy of you.” He also said he wouldn’t sell Airchat data to another company building AI models, especially since the app is relatively small and its data is unclassified. However, Airchat will likely use people’s voice data to train a model that improves its own audio and transcription functions. If you participate, you have chosen to participate.
I asked Ravikant about whether some AI companies can still collect Airchat data without a formal agreement. He replied: “We’ll block them, we’ll sue them, and then, if I have an array of orbital satellites, we’ll throw them out of orbit.”
Airchat’s monetization plan is unclear. Navikant has not said anything about charging access fees. The current format seems to work well for audio ads, but there’s always the risk of making them unlistenable to the app.
There’s also the issue of content moderation where unfiltered audio bytes of people are posted to their timeline as soon as they release their virtual microphone. One troll appeared to overstep his bounds on Sunday, cursing at the app’s founders, calling the app “fucking trash” and in so many words telling the founders to, uh, perform stupid acts. Voice notes are still there. So did a thread in which two users went back and forth telling a story about “gay Jewish teenagers” and “neo-Nazi killers.”
