Ignite Startups: Building Human-Like AI Agents That Feel Real with Vish Hari | Ep269

Episode notes

Most AI today is impressive. It can write, code, summarize, and answer almost anything you throw at it. But it still feels… off. You ask a question. It responds. You ask again. It responds again. The interaction is rigid, transactional, and predictable. It doesn’t feel like talking to someone. It feels like issuing commands to a system. Vish Hari thinks that’s the core problem—and the biggest opportunity. From Astrophysics to AI Before founding Ego AI, Vish Hari was deep in research. He studied astrophysics and worked on early deep learning models back in 2012, trying to detect exoplanets—planets that could support life. That was before AI became mainstream. He trained one of his first models in 2013, writing CUDA code just to get it running. From there, he moved into AI engineering, eventually working in applied research at Facebook. After nearly a decade in the field, he noticed something important. Every major AI lab was chasing the same goal: superintelligence. But almost no one was focused on making AI feel human. The Problem: AI Doesn’t Feel Like a Partner Right now, AI behaves like a tool. You give it instructions. It executes. That’s it.