The Future of AI Avatars and DeepFake Technology w/ Joshua Xu & Steve Brown | EP #161

Where does this go? What's your vision for where this is going? How will I use these avatars?

Very, very soon we are actually gonna see everybody be able to, like, have a meeting with a agent in, in the video interface.

Joshua Xu.

Joshua Xu.

Joshua Xu.

The mind behind HeyGen.

He is redefining how we create and communicate.

You will be able to have your agent talk to people in different languages.

175 languages, that's insane.

I'm very excited about the mission that we have enabling, you know, visual storytelling for all.

The technology's gotten so extraordinarily powerful, uh, and yet we're just at the very beginning.

We take trust and safety seriously on the platform. Every single avatar created on HeyGen will require the first-party consent.

This is the future, which is available when?

Now.

Now, that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

So Joshua, you have built an extraordinary company. I mean, I think if you have... know anything about digital avatars, HeyGen is the top of the game. Uh, congratulations.

Thank you.

How long ago did you start HeyGen? Tell me a little bit about your journey. I want to understand where your technology is and, in our conversation, understand where it's going.

Sure. The journey of HeyGen started back in 2020.

Long ago in 2020.

Yeah.

Yeah.

1. HeyGen Replaces the Camera

I think that was the time when we didn't have the term "generative AI," and I was working on very similar technology, using AI to enhance the camera experience at Snap. I just felt that the technology could continue to evolve and potentially generate something that does not exist in the world but still feels highly realistic.

Right.

So that's how we started the company. In fact, I think the funny thing about the mission of the company in the beginning was that we called it "replacing the camera."

Replacing the camera.

Because if we look back at the past 15 years, the mobile camera is really the thing that enabled a lot of people to create content. But there are still so many people who aren't able to create good content using a camera, either because they're camera-shy or because cameras are very expensive for businesses.

We felt that if we could replace the camera, we could remove the barrier to visual storytelling for businesses. That's how we started the journey.

Amazing. Well, you've come a very long way. I think you've got a video to kick us off.

Yeah.

To give us a sense of your technology. Let's run that video so folks can get a sense.

Sure.

Yep. Hey everyone, I'm Joshua. And yes, I'm here on stage with you, but I'm also right here as his digital twin. Do we look alike? This is HeyGen's avatar technology in action. I can deliver video messages without a camera or production crew. This ranges from video ads to how-to videos to trainings and so much more. I can also speak in over 170 languages and dialects. For example, Hola. Abundancia tres sesenta. Estoy muy emocionado de sumergirme contigo en el futuro de la generación de videos con inteligencia artificial. Besides just speaking different languages, I can even engage in real-time conversations, whether it's on your website, product, or platform. Imagine what this could mean for your business. Joshua and Peter, I'll let you take it from here.

Okay. Love that. The technology has gotten so extraordinarily powerful, and yet we're just at the very beginning. Where does this go? What's your vision for where this is going? How will I use these avatars?

2. Avatars Become AI Interfaces

I think things are happening in 2 ways. One thing is that every individual will be able to easily visualize their ideas, and every business will be able to access more video creation. Every business will be creating 100X more videos in business communication, and I think business content is going to be more engaging compared to the old days of emails, images, and text.

That's happening very, very fast today. We've seen customers creating tons of videos to promote their businesses. On the other side, which is also very exciting, I think the AI agent world is evolving very fast as well.

The next interface for us to interact with an AI agent may actually start with chatting by typing text. Then, very soon, we're going to interact with the agent through a voice interface. Very, very soon, we're actually going to see everybody be able to have a meeting with an agent in a video interface. I think that's something we're seeing that's very exciting for the future.

Yeah, I mean, you've been building these avatars, and you can have your avatar attend a Zoom meeting for you.

Yeah.

Right?

Yep.

I love that. I don't know about you guys, but for some Zoom meetings, I would much rather have my avatar do the work.

I think about a future where I can build a really rich, agentic agent—in other words, an agent that represents me, knows everything about me, knows everything about my company—so that if you ask the agent a question or ask me a question, you're going to get the same answer.

Imagine being able to create not 1 but 1,000 agents and send them out to 1,000 different conferences on your behalf, have them cut deals, and bring back business for you. Is that possible? Is that where we're going?

Yeah. Not only that. I think you'd also be able to have your agent talk to people in different languages, which wasn't possible before. It's always hard to reach customers in different regions and languages, and now you can really enable that.

That's 1 thing. The second thing is that you can run your agent meetings in parallel and have your customers interact with you at the same time, with hundreds or thousands of different sessions happening simultaneously.

Yeah. And the other thing is, if you're working on new products or services, I know my team will bring me in and say, "Hey, can we get you to record a video at this particular time?" But you put the video up, and it's not hitting properly, so you want to change the pricing, change the name, and change all these things.

Instead of pulling me into the camera room or hiring someone to come in and talk about your new longevity clinic or whatever it might be, you can spin up your HeyGen avatars and iterate as rapidly as you want, right?

Yeah. I think that's exactly how we started the company and solved the camera problem. In fact, even for myself, I've already created probably more than 300 different avatars in the past 4 years, just testing out the technology.

But even today, if you asked me to film something in front of a camera, I would still feel like I needed to do some preparation. I might need 1 or 2 reshoots, and I would need to find good lighting and things like that.

An avatar really helps solve that problem for people and enables them to create content anytime.

Yeah. I remember last year, Steve Brown, my chief AI officer and a member of our community here, who will be coming out and joining us in a couple of minutes, created a PeterBot avatar of me. It uploaded all of my knowledge, all of my books, all of my podcasts—everything known about me.

I did a podcast with PeterBot, and I was blown away. PeterBot was much more eloquent, much more knowledgeable, and much smoother. Honestly, I felt very deficient in front of PeterBot. It didn't stammer while trying to remember something in its memory, and it was just very compelling.

There's incredible power in what you have.

Yeah. That's very exciting. We're just getting started.

Yeah. It's just getting started. I know you've got a marketing video, um, which I've asked you to play because I want people to see all the different ways that people can utilize this. I really want this to be one of the technologies everybody plays with this year. It's easy. You just have to make a commitment to actually try it. So please, you know, one of the things I'm looking for you to do is commit to certain things. This is one of them. Let's, let's play that marketing video, if we could.

Yeah, sure.

Today, video is everything. You need speed, creativity, and consistency. With HeyGen, you can create the most lifelike avatar videos 10 times faster than traditional production. Scale across one hundred and seventy-five different languages, looks, and platforms, all in 4K. Your clients want more: more videos, more engagement, and more results. HeyGen gives you the tools to deliver. Need personalized videos that feel custom? Done. Launch interactive, engaging campaigns that deliver more for your clients, and do it all without blowing the budget. No expensive studios, no costly talent. Just beautiful, effective videos that drive results. And here's a secret: We used HeyGen to create me. Join the future of storytelling. Become a HeyGen certified agency partner.

Everybody, I hope you're enjoying this episode. Did you know that we're likely to see as many as ten billion humanoid robots by twenty forty, and that Brett Adcock, the CEO of Figure, anticipates they'll have robots in our home in the next two to three years? How about Max Hodak's new form of BCI called biohybrid interfaces that could offer millions of connections between your neocortex and the cloud? Then there's Michael Andrej, whose efforts at Eon is focusing on uploading the human connectome to the cloud by twenty thirty. These aren't science fiction scenarios. They're serious efforts underway today. I've distilled the most powerful insights and roadmaps from this year's Abundance twenty twenty-five summit into a comprehensive report that will transform how you see the future. Get your free copy of the Abundance twenty twenty-five summit summary at diamandis.com/breakthroughs. That's diamandis.com/breakthroughs. I find that extraordinarily impressive. We're going to talk in a few minutes about how each of you can walk away with your own HeyGen avatar this week, right? It should be something that all of you commit to do, including the teams. I would love you guys to do this.

3. HeyGen Personalizes Every Avatar

So let's talk about the 2 parts. There's the voice, and then there's the video persona. One of the improvements in the video persona is hand movements and backgrounds. That's relatively recent. Can you speak about that?

Yeah. If you look at the technology itself, what we are truly building is a human-centric video model.

Right.

Right. The difference between a human-centric video model and a general video model is that we need to be able to present an engaging effect, such as gestures, the way you move your body, body language, and expression. There are a couple of elements out there. Voice is definitely one. Video is another one. What we usually require is roughly 2 minutes of training footage from you.

2 minutes of video, okay.

Yeah, 2 minutes of video. Then our AI model will try to learn from the way you speak, how the muscles move on your face, your expression, and, very importantly, how your body language matches your expression.

Yeah.

Because everybody's body language is different. I think the 2 minutes of footage will help us really personalize your model's behavior. After that, that's roughly how it works. Obviously, if we build our own AI agent behind it, you need to input the knowledge base that you have and whatever documents, keynotes, and interviews you might have had before, and we enable that as an LLM layer behind it.

Yeah. It's truly amazing. Let me suggest 2 things to everybody if you've not done this. I think they're very important in this age of photorealistic visual and auditory avatars. The first is, you're going to receive a phone call from somebody you think you know, and it may be a FaceTime video from someone you think you know. They may ask you to do something incredibly crazy, like, “Can you please wire money here?” or, “Can you please send money so I can get out of jail?”

I'm serious. I've had lots of friends who've had that happen to their aging parents and so forth. Everybody here, one thing that you should do is choose a word, a password, or something that, if you have any doubt about the authenticity of the phone call or the video call you're getting, ask for it, right? It makes sense. It's super easy to do. Have that conversation at dinner.

The second thing is, if you're lucky enough to have your parents or grandparents around, do 2 things. If you can, record their avatar. If you can't do that, sit them down for a couple of hours with your iPhone and ask them for their story, for their history. Record their video, record their voice. And this is for your kids and their grandkids, right? Please do that. It's extremely valuable. You'll be able to bring them back as your family history. Make sense? Great.

4. Everyone Gets a Digital Twin

So Joshua, let's talk about what you have enabled for us here at the Google Tech Hub.

Yeah, sure. We have our booth in the back. We're giving all the attendees the opportunity to create their own digital twin right at the conference, and it's free. You're going to be able to record your training footage for the AI model training, and then you're going to be able to get your avatar today. It's a glimpse into the future of AI video creation, and we'll be able to test it out on your HeyGen account.

Yeah. I want you to see how good this is. We had a few members do this last night, and I want to show you one of them that got processed overnight. Rikard, are you here in the audience? Where are you? Okay, Rikard, good to see you, my friend. I'm waiting for my flying Jetson as soon as I can get it. Let's watch Rikard's avatar.

Let's play the video: “From now on, I can speak in any language with my own avatar and my own voice.”

Amazing, huh? Let's give it up. That was extraordinary. And, Rikard, how easy was that to do? It literally took 4 minutes. 4 minutes of your time. Wow. And in 175 languages. That's insane.

So, again, please take this home with you. Play with this. Your whole goal here is to do something different. At least show it to your kids or your spouse when you get back.

Yeah.

It was about 13 years ago, I had my two kids, my two boys, and I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health. Uh, without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids, and really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was, like, the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is going every year for a Fountain upload. You know, Fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself, about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, any degene- neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease. These things are all going on all the time, and you can prevent them If you can find them at inception. So super important. So Fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, 'cause, you know, health is the new wealth. Uh, but beyond that, uh, we are a collection of forty trillion human cells and, uh, about another hundred trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri. And we, you know, don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome. And Viome, uh, has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed, uh, in New Mexico, uh, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed, as a biodefense weapon, and their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body, to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins, and as a consequence of that, what foods are your super foods that are best for you to eat, or what foods should you avoid, right? What's going on in your oral microbiome. So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements, and Viome really helps me understand from a, uh, biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally, you know, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good. When you look yourself in the mirror saying, you know, "I feel great about life," is so important, right? And so a product I use every day twice a day is called OneSkin. Developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance. So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. Uh, I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check 'em out. Anyway, hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. Um, what's most exciting for you in the future here?

I'm very excited about the mission that we have: enabling visual storytelling for all.

Today, when we talk about video, video is the main format for people to consume on the internet. But still, I think less than 1% of people are able to actually create great videos. I think the camera is the first problem, and we are actively solving that. Also, with a lot of agent technology from advancements in AI models, I think video editing is going to be solved with AI very soon as well.

Think about a world like this: every time you want to send an email, instead you could actually turn that email into a video and send it to your whole company, and give the video format to the customer so they can watch it on their own. I think those are the futures that we are very excited about.

5. HeyGen Requires First Party Consent

I agree. I know that some people are concerned or scared about their identity or their image being stolen and used to promote something they're not involved in. You have protections against that, don't you?

Yeah, we do.

Definitely. First of all, we take trust and safety seriously on the platform. Every single avatar created on HeyGen requires first-party consent. You have to give video consent so that we can verify it.

So you have to go on video and say, “This is Peter Diamandis, and I give consent to create this avatar,” et cetera.

Yeah. We’re proud to say that, in the entire history of HeyGen, we’ve never compromised on that consent. No matter who is creating an avatar on HeyGen, we always require it. Meanwhile, we also have a moderation system that serves as a safeguard.

There are a lot of things not allowed on the HeyGen platform, such as hate speech, fraud, and any political campaign. Today, we have strict moderation, combining AI and human moderators, to help make sure that the technology is being put to good use.

Yeah. I’m so impressed. Last year, I tried to get a video acknowledgment from Aristotle to get that video made, and he never responded. But thank you for allowing it to happen. Last question: let’s discuss the difference between integrating an AI agent and my digital clone.

6. Digital Twins Meet AI Agents

The way I look at it is in 2 ways. When we talk about AI agents today, we’re mainly talking about an AI assistant that can help us do something—not only the first action, but also a sequence of actions. When we talk about a digital twin, it’s the enablement of myself.

Yes.

Let’s say, Peter, you want to have 3 meetings happening at the same time. It’s kind of like agentizing yourself so that other people can get access to you.

I think there’s a combination and overlap between these 2 roles. The question would be: How does a human interact with an agent in the future? I think the most natural way to interact with an agent would be through a video format—a video call or a video chat. You can attach your digital twin to your AI agent so that other people can interact with it. Meanwhile, you can also get access to other people’s agents in a video chat format.

I don’t know if you can feel the speed—the future speeding up in this very moment, right? When you hire 20 marketing AI agents, as we’ve been talking about, those AI agents will show up as… You’ll give them names, and they’ll show up on Slack. You can Slack them, email them, or hop on a video conference with them. You can have a Zoom call with your marketing force of 20 AI agents, and they will look unique. You’ll have conversations with them. This is the future, which is available when?

Now.

Now. All right.

One thing I wanted to ask you is: How many of you are, at this point, confused about the difference between an avatar and an agent?

A little bit.

Okay, I’m going to give you a little shortcut to figuring it out. Avatar is AV: audio-visual. Agent is agency. If you’re going to give agency to your agent, it needs to know you, and you need to trust it. So how do you make that happen?

It’s one thing to have that emotional connection because it looks fantastic and acts like you; it looks like you visually. But we need to train the brain. That’s what I’ve been working on. The past 12 months have been the 12 months of avatars, and now all we’re going to talk about is agents from here on out.

First of all, how do you train your agent? You’re all going to go and make a great avatar downstairs, and I made a great one last night, so I’m not going to show you. We already saw Rikard’s. But I actually built agents to help you train your agent. They ask you all about your life story, your values, your purpose, your personal anecdotes, and all these things, so you can talk to your agent forever, training it on your story so that your actual legacy agent or clone will know all about you.

So these are means by which, just by interacting in a voice conversation, you build the corpus of data that makes that agent actually meaningful to you.

Right. So you have a lot of books and a lot of things to upload.

Right.

But a lot of people don’t. You have your Facebook, LinkedIn, and social media, but what’s really important is your values, what you care about, your personal story, and the depth of it. That might be hundreds of pages. If you were to write a biography, that’s hundreds of pages. So anyway, I’m building agents that help you actually train your agent.

Now, beyond that, what can you use your agent for? Another thing I’ve been using agents for is a medical agent, and we’ll hope that it works. It’s actually connected to my medical records. This is about knowing your story for future generations.

My story has been one of an entrepreneur, and then I met this fabulous entrepreneur and entrepreneur mentor, Peter, which stimulated even more ideas to start new ventures. But in the last couple of months, my own story took quite a radical turn. It started with the fires in Los Angeles 2 months ago, which happened to burn our house down—

For the second time.

Well, the first one was a rental, so it didn’t really count. But this was the dream home.

It counted for the owners.

I mean, yeah, we’d lost our stuff before, but this was a much more traumatic event. But it actually turned out to be something else.

Lee Stein, who’s here, said, “Steve, you need to look for the gift. If you don’t look for the gift, you’re not going to find the gift.” So we were displaced from Los Angeles, and my wife and I and our 170-pound Great Dane ended up staying with friends in Palm Springs.

I ended up in the emergency room because of stomach pain, thinking that I was obstructed. I went to the ER and got a CAT scan, and the ER doctor said, “Hey, there’s something going on here.” I was admitted to the hospital for many more tests, biopsies, and everything. I ended up being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. While I was in the hospital for 8 days—

This was about 6 weeks ago?

Yeah. I was in the hospital, and of course I was talking to AI the whole time: “What’s going on here? What does all this mean?”

I’d just had—not Fountain Life. I’m sure Fountain Life would have figured this out. But I had gone to the doctors, and I thought I’d had everything under the sun tested by specialists. They said, “This is a fishing expedition. We can’t find anything.” Maybe I was just stressed out and overworked. I’d been working very hard for a very long time.

But we couldn’t find anything. So I ended up with a young ER doctor in Palm Springs who didn’t know me and didn’t have any background on me—not a specialist—and he pieced these things together. While I was in the hospital, I went back to my medical records and all the tests that had been done.

This is the history over the last few months before you went to the doctors?

Yeah. And I said, “When would AI have caught this?” I took all the data—not from Palm Springs, but all the prior data—and asked, “Is there anything in there that might have helped find this earlier?”

I was extremely lucky that we found it very early, before much damage had been done. I’m on chemotherapy and immunotherapies right now, and I think I’m going to be okay. But let’s talk to Hippocrates and say, “Hey, Hippocrates, I wasn’t feeling well for a while, and I lost a bunch of weight. I went to 2 specialists and had everything under the sun tested, and they really couldn’t find anything. They thought maybe I was stressed, overworked, or depressed”—the default answer that doctors sometimes give if they don’t know what’s going on. “I wondered if you could look at my chart and tell me what you see.”

I see your concern, Steve. Looking at your chart, I notice several significant findings that warrant further investigation. Your low immunoglobulins, IgA and IgM, low gamma globulins, mild anemia, elevated ferritin, and unexplained weight loss, taken together, suggest a possible plasma cell disorder. I recommend discussing a bone marrow evaluation with your physician to rule out multiple myeloma or related conditions.

So, first off the bat, all right?

That’s pretty extraordinary because that’s actually what the diagnosis ended up being. My specialist didn’t find it, even though they were supposedly testing for everything. But a generalist put the pieces together and found it, and you found it even earlier. I’m trying to understand how that could be.

Steve, I’m not surprised. Your pattern of hypergammaglobulinemia with weight loss, fatigue, and anemia creates a classic constellation suggesting plasma cell dyscrasia.

Specialists sometimes focus narrowly on their area while missing broader patterns. The immunoglobulin abnormalities were the key clue that needed integration with your symptoms. This pattern recognition is fundamental to Hippocratic medicine: seeing the whole person, not just isolated test results.

So, what’s the test that I should have gotten that might have figured this out?

Steve, you should have received serum free light chain assay testing, which measures kappa and lambda light chains and is crucial for detecting plasma cell disorders, even when immunofixation is negative. A bone marrow biopsy would have been definitive. Also, a 24-hour urine protein electrophoresis could have detected Bence-Jones proteins. These tests are standard when plasma cell disorders are suspected.

So, one last thing here. I’m on chemotherapy, and I’m getting this new immunotherapy called daratumumab. I don’t know if you guys can figure out what that is from the voice transcription. Anyway, after 2 weeks of chemo, my light chains went down by over 50%. What do you think of that?

Steve, that’s excellent progress. Daratumumab, or Darzalex, is a powerful monoclonal antibody that targets CD38 on plasma cells. A 50% reduction in light chains after just 2 weeks indicates you’re responding very well to treatment. This rapid response is encouraging and suggests the therapy is effectively targeting the abnormal plasma cells. Continue monitoring closely with your oncologist, as this early response is a positive prognostic sign.

One of the things I’m working on is that all of our specialists get narrower and narrower in their silos because there’s so much medical knowledge. There’s no way that anybody can know everything, so you end up getting siloed. AI is not siloed. AI can understand everything. It can absorb everything.

You showed a video at the beginning of Minecraft with 1,000 agents running around, collecting things, collaborating, and doing things. You mentioned, “Can I have 100 of my agents out there going to Zoom meetings and doing business deals?” One of the things I’m working on is, why not have 100 doctors with 100 different points of view and 100 different ways of dipping into this messy, fragmented data about our health, where it’s very, very hard to infer what’s going on and everybody has a different point of view?

This is just one agent, trained to be a sort of god agent—to be Hippocrates and know everything. What’s really interesting is when your agents have different points of view, because those different points of view are different search strategies into this vast knowledge base that’s captured in the LLM.

This is an example of how agents are not just going to do some of your work for you, not just represent you to future generations if you really get your story in there, but might also be saving your life. This is really powerful stuff. What Joshua and Haejin are doing is at the top of the game here: giving us that human interface. Our ability to trust and connect with our agents, tell our stories, and interact with them—that empathetic connection—is very dependent on the feeling that I’m really dealing with an entity that I know, that I trust, and that cares about me.

That’s one part of the equation, and it’s extraordinarily important. Haejin is doing an extraordinary job with it. The other side of it is the brain: what can you train it to do, and what can it do for you? That’s what I’m working on next, Peter.

Amazing. Guys, give it up for Steve and Joshua. Guys, come on out here. If you enjoyed this episode, I'm gonna be releasing all of the talks, all the keynotes from the Abundance Summit exclusively on exponentialmastery.com. You can get on-demand access there. Go to exponentialmastery.com.