Joseph Sirosh, a former corporate vice president at Microsoft who was most recently at Amazon leading search and Alexa efforts, just launched a new startup that aims to let creators build their own conversational AI agents.
The company, CreatorsAGI, was incorporated in January and is still in stealth mode.
CreatorsAGI wants to give authors, YouTubers, media producers, and other creators a way to build AI assistants that reflect their own content or personality — and earn money through a new revenue stream.
For example, a non-fiction writer could build an assistant based on their books, and then coach other writers, 24/7, in any language, with the bot.
A fiction writer could create an agent that entertains users in the style of their books, and allow them to imagine new extensions of stories in a collaborative way.
“It is a two-sided marketplace platform, where authentic creators (authors or others with their own proprietary content) can build a conversational AI that is grounded in the content they bring,” Sirosh told GeekWire via email. “This means that the creator has control over the conversational output of the AI, creating authenticity and credibility.”
Sirosh, who left Amazon in November, declined to comment on investment raised or number of employees at the company.
The longtime tech leader oversaw the development of AI-enhanced customer interactions while at Amazon. He previously was chief technology officer at real estate giant Compass, and was CTO of AI at Microsoft, where he worked for more than five years.
CreatorsAGI is one of several new startups enabling companies and individuals to build their own AI agents for a variety of use cases, taking advantage of the latest advancements in generative AI.
AI giant OpenAI last year rolled out GPTs, which let users create custom versions of ChatGPT.
Character.AI, which builds chatbots that can “impersonate virtually anyone or anything,” was in talks last year to raise more investment at a valuation north of $5 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Sirosh said CreatorsAGI differentiates from the bevy of consumer AI chatbot offerings by focusing on enabling what he describes as “authentic generative interactions.” Training its chatbots on verified and approved data from users could also help give CreatorsAGI an edge given privacy concerns around generative AI.
Funding to generative AI startups increased five-fold in 2023, and there are already 36 related companies valued at $1 billion or more, according to CB Insights. There are hundreds of other gen AI startups like CreatorsAGI just getting off the ground.
