That's a whole different thing, isn't it?

Yeah, I think one of the things that I've really noticed with Demi this year, like we know her as an emotional rider and she's continued to be emotional.

But I think in the racing setting, she's not letting those emotions take over her thinking and the way that she's going about the race.

Yeah.

in this world championship race when she got caught, obviously like her plan was that she was just going to ride away with 38Ks to go and like job done.

But she got caught and she had to just be like, right, okay, this is a situation now.

I'm resetting.

But I wonder now if like everyone's seen like how mentally resilient Demis become, if they're going to be like, well, shit, Perhaps that's a new frontier.

And you still benefited in that way.

I agree with you and I also know you.

And so I know some of that is your protection, right? That like, yeah.

And for you specifically, and for probably a lot of people of this listening, they approach dating with that mindset in order to protect themselves from what they actually want, which is, I mean, I could sit here and say with 100% confidence that the majority of people, unless they're a psychopath, want love.

Yeah.

And connection.

Yeah.

And I think even just like sitting down and having conversations like this to be like, yeah, but I wouldn't trade this stress for any other stress that I could.

What is the underlying, like, kind of large language model or world model that Abbie uses?

Um, so she uses quite a number of different models that are available online today.

So, you know, she's got, like we talked about earlier, all of her, like, sensory input from, like, her microphone array, to her cameras, to her LIDAR, and all of that is fed into, like, her behavior tree, which then has... uses different models and different parts of her architecture to then give a response, whether it's a behavior, or a verbal response, or a gesture, or suggesting an activity.

So, um, I think a lot of people have the misconception that, and understandably so, that, um, you know, companion robots today are just, like, almost LLM wrappers.

But, um, when it comes to building, like, a social robotic system or a s- or social interface, like we talked about earlier on, there's so many nuances that are being brought in to, like...

You know, like the... like we talked about, like the voice prosody, the microexpressions, the sentiment analysis, um, and then also then, like, structuring the personality of Abbie as well.

Like, hardware is inevitably gonna reach a failure poi- like, fa- failure points are gonna happen.

One of my concerns around the use of AI chatbots for now is around safety, right? And guardrails around like what kind of recommendations this chatbot or this AI system can give you, especially around mental health, right? So how does Abby handle a situation where a person is potentially considering harming themselves?

How difficult was it for you to then figure out what your next steps were going to be, not just for your robot, Abby, but the whole company, Andromeda?

How I decided what I wanted to do next after I won Vogue was I just wanted to execute on everything that I'd promised Vogue that I would be doing.

I mean, it was the ultimate form of public accountability.

[laughs] Like, you know, I'd said to, you know, a panel of really reputable women, "This is what I wanna build.

This is what I'm gonna do" And then not only that, it's printed in the magazine, and so people in public could read it.

Obviously, that wasn't the only reason that got me there, but it was an unbelievable tool to keep me accountable to, you know, wanting to do everything that I said I'd do, which is really build Abby and bring her into the industry, commercialize her, productize her, hire a team.

I'd say in the four years of building Andromeda, which we're still at the start, but the hardest part so far was the first two years, and that's primarily because, despite the fact that I'd shared the story with, with Vogue and everyone being supportive, it was still the time where we had the most critics, the least support for our ideas.

How do you work through challenges when you are, you know, deploying robots in a really sensitive environment?

So thank you.

Yeah.

I also love just the modeling that you presented in that of, I'm going to model to you that I can come to you with accountability and that we can work through this together to figure out that repair or figure out a way through this.

It was not a, like you said, I'm right, you're wrong.

It was, let's approach this with curiosity and compassion and meet in the middle.

You're meeting her where she's at to then find the through line.

And then she's able to come to you and say, well, actually, no, I was actually just taking that personally, but what a beautiful modeling of healthy relationship dynamics that you should be able to come to anybody in a relationship and say, one, I take accountability for this, but also two, like you said, for her to come to you and say, hey, I feel like you missed me here, also really just a testament to the safety that you built within your relationship with her that she's able to come to you and even say that and bring more of an emotional charge to you without you setting that on fire and bringing it even higher, right? Such a testament to like the work that you've done, your ability to regulate and not be triggered because there are a lot of people who if you haven't done your work would be triggered in that situation.

My

And to give reflection on that, we have Grace here as a graduate of the class.

I'm a graduate of last year's program.

And I just wanted to take a step back for those of us who are fellow Kirklanders who may not understand how the Kirkland Initiative process is.

Yes, please.

Yes.

It's an eight-week-long program.

where Kirklanders get the chance to do a deep dive into all things about this city that we live and love.

Among other things, you are a member of the Cultural Arts Commission.

So, Grace, will you tell us very, very briefly what is the time trial and then what's unique about it within the sport of of bike racing?

Yeah, so the time trial is an individual event and it is basically the rider against the clock over a certain course.

So the course can change.

It can be different distances.

It can be hilly.

It can be flat.

But the aim is to go as fast as you can possible.

The