AIMinds #027 | Saurav Kumar, Founder & CEO at xAGI

About this episode

Saurav Kumar is the Founder and CEO of xAGI, an innovative AI product studio and research company. Prior to leading xAGI, he was the Chief Technology Officer at Authlayer, a fintech startup that was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 (YCW19) batch.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Podcast addicts, Castbox. You can also watch this episode on YouTube.

In this AI Minds podcast episode, Saurav Kumar, CEO of xAGI, recounts his journey from developing video compression algorithms in India to founding xAGI. He discusses his early work with Amazon research grants, his exploration of blockchain and cryptocurrency, and his pivotal experiences with Y Combinator, which led to the creation of xAGI, a studio focused on AI-driven human-computer interaction and business automation.

The episode highlights xAGI's key products, including 'Convolexa', an interactive voice-response system, and an AI-powered health insurance advisor. It also explores future projects like an astrology-based application, illustrating Saurav's broad vision for AI.

Saurav shares valuable insights on AI product development, emphasizing reducing latency for a better user experience, offering advice for both tech enthusiasts and industry veterans interested in AI and entrepreneurship.

Fun Fact: Saurav’s company is developing an AI-driven health insurance advisory bot that helps users select the most suitable insurance plans based on personal health data and family history, counteracting biased recommendations in the existing insurance market. This innovation aims to empower consumers with impartial and comprehensive information to make informed decisions

Show Notes:

00:00 Developed video compression algorithm to improve internet speed.

06:20 Interest in Google research paper leads to business.

10:26 Spammy insurance sales in India; unbiased alternative.

14:34 Astrology charts are complex and open to interpretation.

15:46 Indian astrology more in-depth than Western astrology.

More Quotes from [Speaker]:

Transcript:

Demetrios:

Welcome back to the AI Minds podcast. This is a podcast where we explore the companies of tomorrow being built. AI first. I am your host, Dmitri Ose, and this episode is brought to you by Deepgram, the number one voice API on the Internet today. Trusted by the world's top conversational AI leaders, startups, and enterprises like Spotify, Twilio, NASA, and Citibank. We are joined this episode by the CEO and founder of xAGI Saurav. How you doing, dude?

Saurav Kumar:

I'm doing great. Thank you for having me.

Demetrios:

Well, I want to start off getting to know you more, because your background is very colorful. I know that in 2015, you started working on compression algorithms, and you were doing a lot of work through Amazon, if I'm not mistaken, on compressing videos. Can you tell me more about that?

Saurav Kumar:

Yeah, absolutely. So I come from New Delhi, India, and back in 2015, the Internet speeds, we were still on 2G and 3G networks. So watching, like, MIT courseware videos and coursera videos, it was a big, big task because you would have to download them and then share it across pen drives in your college network and all. So I was thinking of a way to compress educational videos to very small size. So I came up with a lossy video compression algorithm that basically got cut across a lot of part of the video, which was not useful, and just focused on the most valuable part of the video. So, let's say if it was a lecture of some professor explaining something on the blackboard, so we would vectorize the professors writing on the blackboard and just truncate the portion of his space which was speaking, and that gave us like 90% to 95% compression. And this, this project was facilitated by Amazon research Grant, which is a part of their many initiatives.

Demetrios:

So, first of all, I want to comment on the fact that you were playing with vectorizing things in 2015. I'm sure that got very. That came in useful later on down the line where you are now. But from there, you got a little bit interested in crypto, if I'm not mistaken.

Saurav Kumar:

I worked on video compresions a lot. We started with the educational videos, and then we saw that even stand up comedy also offers a platform where there's just one speaker and who is walking across the stage. So then we moved to compressing standard comedy videos, and then I realized the important fact that compression is the. Is one of the many ways to arrive at truth, right? So there are many ways to arrive at truth, and one of the ways is compression. So that's like a. Another philosophical tangent. So I got me thinking like what are the other areas where this technology could be used? So one place I applied it was compressing URL. So which is like your typical URL shortener.

Saurav Kumar:

So. But the key for to make that work was you needed a database which everyone had access to so they can uncompress the URL when they wanted to access the longer URL. Right. And that's how the blockchain came about as a solution. So it's like a distributed ledger which everyone, as the same state, is on the same state. So I implemented that technology for compressing URL's and then at the same time I got interested into the technology of blockchain, how it works.

Demetrios:

And you were playing around with Ethereum back when it first came out.

Saurav Kumar:

So Ethereum, ICO, I still remember, we were like reading the, reading the yellow paper and just discussing like what this new thing is. Because Vitalik at that time was a field fellow and I was closely following many field fellows at that time what they were doing. So I started with Ethereum, like writing smart contracts, learning solidity, and then hopefully building something on top.

Demetrios:

That's fascinating, then your journey shifted. You moved from India and you went into Silicon Valley and did the whole YC thing, right?

Saurav Kumar:

I basically applied to YC with an idea of building a product that I saw in us. So as part of my Amazon research, I went to us for some time and then I saw a product which was like a bank account integration for fintech applications and a similar product was not existing in India. So I thought, let's create something for the indian market. And the government was also actively involved in this area. So long story short, we applied to IC. I applied to IC with a couple of my friends and we got to learn more about this world of Silicon Valley. I met the ondors of Airbnb, Twitch, OpenAI, and got to see it firsthand, like what it is like building a company in the valley. It was a great, great experience.

Demetrios:

It's really cool to know that you got to meet and network with some of these very predominant names in the field, especially people like the founders of OpenAI or Twitch or Stripe or Airbnb. All of that is very useful, I imagine, for your journey. And now you are not only creating an AI consultancy, but an AI product company. Can you explain a little bit about what you've got going on?

Saurav Kumar:

So when the research paper from Google attention is all you need came out, I got really interested in what sort of opportunities it will unlock. More interested, I was in the focus of the hacker news community on this paper, how much importance they were giving to it, so that the same thing had happened back when bitcoin paper had come up. The academy community was like all very interested in that. So it got me reading that paper and coming up with a plan of how these things will change the computer layer of current software. So I started xAGi, it's AI product studio and consultancy firm where we develop LLM applications to, you know, further enhance the way humans operate with computers and automate business operations across multiple layers, including collecting customer feedback and doing research.

Demetrios:

Okay, so that is the, the inspiration behind it. What have you been seeing by way of challenges when you're trying to build out products that have AI in them, or even AI first product.

Saurav Kumar:

So one of the challenges is basically bringing down the latency because Web, Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 has, have got us this used to this fast, quick feedback when we use the websites and applications. And if you try using any voice bot or any LLM application, there's like a fundamental delay. So bringing that latency down is the most important thing to improving that UX, which we are constantly trying to do, and the various voice agents and other watch that we are working on.

Demetrios:

And how are you going about that? Because I know just LLMs in general are not known for their speed. You add in a few other API calls and it all starts to stack on top of each other. Right. So it's really hard engineering problem. Have you found anything that works? Well?

Saurav Kumar:

Yeah, we're actively looking at what, what possible solution there could be. And some of the models like in LLM, like this anthropic lord high co model that is pretty fast, faster than GPT four, as well as intelligent. So we are closely looking at what they are doing differently in trying to bring down the speed and implementing those across different UX layers like voice and chat. So it's mostly like reading a lot of research paper, following up like GitHub repositories to see what's the latest going.

Demetrios:

On and what is the products that you've created so far.

Saurav Kumar:

So one of the products that we have is convolexa. It's a voice that we forms where companies can create a link and distribute it to their I audience, where people can fill up a survey by answering questions and talking to a voice agent. So apart from this, we are also working on our AI insurance advisor board, which will help people choose the right insurance, health insurance for them by asking them a bunch of questions about their age and medical history.

Demetrios:

So both of these sound very useful. I really like the form one you don't have to type in and you can just talk to the forum and hopefully it picks it up and it saves you time. On the insurance one, though it seems a little bit scary because you are actively recommending things that have gigantic impacts on people's lives.

Saurav Kumar:

So the way in India, the way insurance is sold is that it's a very spammy sort of way of selling insurance. Like you sign up for one of these website once and then they keep on following up and eventually sell you the plan, which makes them the most money anyways. So the current recommendation is biased in that way. So what we are doing differently is basically we downloaded all the policy wordings of all the existing policies and then we basically create a vector embedding on top of this data and then we help users compare across all the different parameters of these insurance policies. So you can talk to the board and you can go as deep as you want to choose the right plan. And so that's the basic idea. And even if you feel that you need to talk to like a real person, then that is also an option. We can just give you the number of the insurance advisor and you can talk to them.

Saurav Kumar:

But the board in itself does a pretty good job of someone who is little bit savvy about health insurance to make the right choice.

Demetrios:

I could see that being very valuable for the customer and I could see the insurance companies not liking you at all. Yeah, maybe you're not making friends with the insurance companies because you're potentially down selling the products, but I guess at the end of the day, if you're bringing them business, they've got to be happy, right?

Saurav Kumar:

Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, if people are able to make that purchase decision quickly and so everyone is happy.

Demetrios:

Yeah. Yeah. And you are. If I'm understanding this correctly, you're just asking the customer everything about their health and what they've had past history, all of that good stuff, and then recommending out of all the different options on the market, you're saying, okay, this provider and this plan seems like it will be fine for you. So if it is somebody who's a relatively healthy 25 year old, they're going to be recommended one plan, but if it's an elderly woman, it's going to be a completely different plan.

Saurav Kumar:

Absolutely. So after asking you all these questions and even other specific questions like are you a smoker or not? Or do you have a family history of diabetes? You know, we can, we can go as niche as possible and give you the right plan and things you might miss in the long terms and conditions of these policies. The board can easily highlight those for you so that you make the right decision at the end of the day.

Demetrios:

And again, this is you talking to the phone, or this is you writing in the forms or talking with the chatbot.

Saurav Kumar:

So, currently, we have both the voice and chat interface. Obviously, chat one. Chat one is the one that we are actively using for making it better, but eventually it will be available on both voice and chat.

Demetrios:

That's awesome. Are there any other areas or projects that you would like to start but you haven't gotten around to it yet because maybe you don't have the time to do it since you already have these two up and running.

Saurav Kumar:

Yeah, like, there's, like, tons of ideas that, you know, we're always excited about. And one of the ideas that the team is really excited about is to use AI in astrology. So astrology, especially spiritual tech, is becoming a. Is actually growing in India a lot. So we are thinking about, you know, how we can use AI to make spiritual tech, and especially astrology, accessible to everyone for, like, a very low cost.

Demetrios:

I love that idea because the last time that I got my astrological charts read, first of all, I have so much respect for the people that read those charts because it's so complicated. There's so many things that you have to keep in mind and understand, and you can read it many different ways. And I think that's the beauty of the person that reads it. They can interpret it in one way or another. Right. But the way that it was done was through an app that was telling the person that was reading my astrology charts, they were showing them things that I didn't really understand, but for them, it made a lot of sense. Right. Like where my house was or where the moon was and all of that.

Demetrios:

And so being able to make that easier for the reader, it feels like a really cool problem to solve.

Saurav Kumar:

Absolutely. It's like we can do a whole podcast episode on just this aspect of astrology. And, yeah, for those who believe in it, it's actually game changing, life changing. And there are a lot of people who derive good, good lessons from this experience.

Demetrios:

Yeah, because we should preface this with astrology readings from someone in India, I think are very different than the astrology readings that you get in the west that come in your column, like, oh, you're a Gemini, just watch out this. It's very vague and kind of general, and so anyone can relate to it. But the astrology readings that I've had, like, are so in depth and so incredibly done. I think I spent an hour and a half with someone just going over all of the different houses that the planets were in and all of that fun stuff.

Saurav Kumar:

Absolutely. We are currently willing to be start working on the beta version of this app. So when it is ready, I will definitely send you an invite.

Demetrios:

Yes, please do. And you bring up the idea of spiritual tech. I feel like another thing that India is known for is yoga. Have you thought about how to bring in tech to that spirituality aspect?

Saurav Kumar:

Yeah, I mean, in India, there's already a lot of startup which are into that, like ashtanga yoga. At Yoga, a lot of people are doing incredible work, which I personally used and derived so much bali auto. So it's a booming industry, as you said.

Demetrios:

Yeah, I guess with yoga, the only thing is, like, tech can't get you into downward dog. You gotta do that one on your own. Well, Saurav, this has been awesome, man. I appreciate you coming on here and chatting with me about everything that you're doing at Xagi. I really am excited for this astrology app. I'm also excited for everything else that you already have in motion. And your drive to help the end consumer get better healthcare policies and insurance is commendable. I appreciate that.

Demetrios:

And so I look forward to hearing how it all goes.

Saurav Kumar:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.