This Founder Just Launched an AI Clone of Himself. Should You?

Entrepreneurs are in a constant, never-ending battle with time. Between managing direct reports, training new employees, and growing the business, it can feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. But what if you could offload some of that work to someone you trust implicitly: a version of yourself? That’s the future imagined by AI clone startup Delphi. They train custom AI models on an individual’s writing, along with their appearances on videos and podcasts, to create a digital double. That digital double can be texted, called, and even video-chatted with. The company has roughly 1,600 paying customers currently. Tyler Denk, founder of fast-growing newsletter startup Beehiiv, recently released his own Delphi-created AI clone, and made it free for subscribers of his personal newsletter, Big Desk Energy (BDE). Denk wrote in his blog that the AI clone, which he named DenkBot, can converse via text and speech, and “has been trained on everything I’ve ever written, all of my social media posts, every podcast interview I’ve ever done, and a handful of other resources (like Beehiiv support docs).” BDE subscribers could use DenkBot to get advice sourced from Denk’s newsletter without needing to sift through dozens of posts. “Tyler’s always been a founder that I and a lot of founders in San Francisco look up to,” says Dara Ladjevardian, Delphi’s co-founder and CEO. Ladjevardian connected with Denk on one of Denk’s annual Costa Rica excursions, and the two discovered that their platforms had much in common. “A lot of our customers are writers who want to scale their expertise in an interactive way,” says Ladjevardian. Ladjevardian says that one of the company’s top use cases is for business leaders and CEOs. Those execs can upload their memos, talks, and presentations to ensure the AI clone retains their knowledge and voice, and then provide the clone as a resource for employees, capable of helping new hires get familiar with workflows and aligning teams around a central vision. According to Ladjevardian, Delphi’s AI clones can also help generate business leads. Of course, Ladjevardian has a clone of himself, and it is accessible through Delphi’s website. Ladjevardian says that he gets a notification whenever his clone talks to an engineer with experience in AI, or whenever it talks to someone who identifies as an influencer or coach. This helps him track down potential new employees and customers. Ladjevardian says that building “heavy hallucination guardrails” has been a priority for Delphi since the company’s 2021 founding, and they are constantly working on tools to ensure AI clones don’t do or say anything their human counterparts wouldn’t. To that end, Delphi users can customize their AI clone’s “creativity score,” which determines how faithful the clone is to the materials it was trained on. If you give your clone a low creativity score, says Ladjevardian, “it will only say things that it’s trained on.” If somebody asks a low-creativity Delphi clone a question that it can’t answer, the clone notifies the real person, who can then “hop into the conversation and improve that answer.” On the flip side, you can set your AI clone to be more adaptive, and give it clearance to attempt to answer questions like you would. If a high-creativity Delphi clone gets something wrong, Ladjevardian says, users can hop into the conversation again, to correct faulty answers or provide the clone with additional training data. Denk, who was featured on the cover of Inc.’s 2024 Best in Business issue, wrote in his blog that the “paradigm of searching and filtering archives of content for answers” will soon give way to tech-based alternatives like Delphi, enabling readers to surface information without searching through dozens of blog posts. Beehiiv hasn’t announced any formal partnership with Delphi, but it’s not difficult to see the appeal for newsletter creators, especially ones specializing in giving advice. Delphi is far from the only company offering AI cloning services. In late 2024, MasterClass debuted On Call, a platform for talking to AI clones of MasterClass instructors like Mark Cuban and Gordon Ramsay. Even café chain Le Pain Quotidien has developed an AI clone of founder Alain Coumont. Google recently published a paper investigating what happens to AI clones when their human counterparts die, describing such clones as “generative ghosts.” BY BEN SHERRY @BENLUCASSHERRY