An Armenian startup wants to make a marketplace for autonomous bots
Pegor Papazian imagines a world that doesn't yet exist.
It's a digital world filled with digital denizens who go about their lives working, interacting and paying their bills.
That's what Papazian wants to create with Bazillion Beings, the startup he founded out of his home country of Armenia. The company is working on a platform for bots that is meant to take them out of messenger apps and thrust them into the real world, where they'll have to figure out how to survive.
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Papazian's vision gets very weird, very fast. It's better to think of it in simple terms.
"The basic idea on Bazillion Beings is to automate the process of creating mashups of services. You can imagine all the apps you can create by combining different services," he said.
Papzian co-founded Bazillion Beings in May 2013 with Tigran Manukyan, growing the company to six full-time employees -- all Armenian. He is working on raising the company's first major round of funding.
The company, based in Yerevan, Armenia, is still six months away from a public launch.
The notion of automation through connecting apps isn't necessarily new. If This Then That has been around for a few years, which allows people to connect apps to trigger each other like receiving a push notification if your friend posts on Instagram.
Papazian wants to take that functionality and turn it into a full ecosystem with the help of bots. But they're not bots like you might visit in Facebook Messenger. Instead, Bazillion Beings calls them lifos. It's a distinction that emphasizes the theoretical world in which these bots would live, a world in which (not unlike our own) they will need to adapt and work to survive.
"It acts very much like evolution or an open market place," Papazian said. "Suddenly it becomes possible for these things to be financially independent."
Here's a lifo called Bento.
Lifos could end up anywhere, wether its in chat applications, web browsers or apps.
Right now, Bazillion Beings is testing just 10 bots. One is a restaurant recommendation bot, another helps make collaborative playlists with friends.
If Papazian has his way, there will be thousands, maybe millions of lifos that do a variety of different things, each one justified by how much they are used and whether they can make enough money to offset their costs.
Lifos will also be able to interact with each other, sharing information and learning from their users.
"We're creating this platform for bot creation with a hive mind. All the machine learning that any individuals bot does is shared across the network," Papazian said.
If this is starting to sound like artificial intelligence, that's because Papazian is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he spent time at the school's AI lab with people like Marvin Minsky, Patrick Winston and other giants in the field of AI.
The company already has an impressive advisory board, including Wolfram Research CEO Stephen Wolfram, Uber engineering lead Raffi Krikorian and Alex Seropian, CEO of gaming company Industrial Toys and the founder of Halo creator Bungie Studios.
Seropian remembers first hearing Papazian's pitch.
"The first thing I said to him after he gave me his 15-minute description of the idea was, 'Hey, you're not going to build Skynet, are you?'" Seropian said.
Once he got past that initial fear (or perhaps in spite of it), Seropian said he was struck by the enormity of Papazian's vision.
"The scope of the idea is what struck me right off the bat as being really ambitious," Seropian said. "It's a platform where a piece of code can evolve, and they can be basically trained to do things we haven't even thought of yet. That's kind of open ended, which is what I find really interesting about it."
Seropian likened the idea to Apple's app store, which provided a way for people to make new programs that could then be widely used.
"It spawned a whole industry. Uber wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the app store right?" Seropian said.
Jason Abbruzzese is a Business Reporter at Mashable. He covers the media and telecom industries with a particular focus on how the Internet is changing these markets and impacting consumers. Prior to working at Mashable, Jason served as Markets Reporter and Web Producer at the Financial Times. Jason holds a B.S. in Journalism from Boston University and an M.A. in International Affairs from Australian National University.
