ⓘ Why Am I Writing?

↻ Name Change: Kamillion is now Sopheva

📰 AI News: A few things from the news are below.

✨ Feature Updates

☎ Want to Learn More?

💭 A Bit About Me, Why I Built This:

I (Rob Wray) have started three tech companies; the last one raised $55M and grew to 500 employees in three states. Finding advisors to help me along this journey was challenging, especially at 2 AM when I couldn't sleep and needed to work through a problem. This experience inspired me to build a virtual board software product.

You know how Abraham Lincoln put his rivals on his cabinet board? Or how Alfred Sloan coined the devil's advocate term? This product helps leaders find cognitive biases, blind spots, and hopefully gives you ideas for your hardest problems.

🤔 What's the New Name? I'm Confused?

I know. I'm sorry. I first called this product Kamillion, who is also a somewhat famous rapper. Who knew? (All of his fans. Not me.) The new name is Sopheva, which comes from Sophia (Greek for wisdom), combined with evolution.

⚡ How Does Sopheva Work?

You pick a topic. Then you pick the world's best thinkers, alive or dead, for this topic. They hop in your virtual room and dig in to help you solve an issue.

🎯 So What?

Think of this as your virtual board of directors or advisory team. Share your board deck, product launch plan, idea whiteboards, or meeting transcript. Then dig deep with questions: How do I make this better? Why will this fail? Be a concerned board member: how could I have run a better meeting? Unlike other AI apps, this app helps you tap into the knowledge of experts in your specific field. Current users are spending a hundred hours a week with this. If it's been a while since you've checked it out, go find out why.

🚀 What's New?

• AI Computer Vision: Start your discussion with 100 pages of images, PDFs, or drawings. The software can now discuss whiteboards, charts, graphs, diagrams, 100-page PDFs, or 500+ pages of plain text.
• Mobile-friendly: iPhone, Android, tablet? Let's go!
• Audio interface. Talk with the AI: I built an audio interface because a CEO or leader could be on a drive, Peloton, or waiting for their kids at soccer practice and want to prepare for a meeting or advisory discussion via audio, not text. Now, you can dial a phone number and talk to the AI, or just use the web interface. The AI interviews you over the phone and builds a meeting preparation document. The report that gets generated will arrive via email and could be for Sopheva, your next coaching session, or any other important meeting. If you want the phone number to test it, let me know at robwray@gmail.com. If you like it, this could be the first of several voice modes. Here is a nerdy system diagram linked here if you want to see how this was built.
• Grade or scoring your topic preparation: Have you ever tried to get advice on a topic but didn't share the backstory? I bet the advice wasn't very good. That's why I built a tool to help users add clarity to their topic before they get AI help.

🔒 Security

You can sign in for free using Google, Apple, or a good old-fashioned password will work. This works with an iPhone and Safari. It's still in beta and hasn't been penetration-tested, but there are lots of security features.

💬 Can We Talk About This?

Yes! How are you using this tool? Should I keep building it? I'm trying to figure out what to build next. I'd love to hear how you're using AI. Send me an email to get in touch. If you want, send me stuff to read in advance so I can prepare.

💡 Food For Thought

Last week I built a complex interactive AI phone, database, and email-integrated product in roughly two days. Last month I did this with computer vision. We're 12 to 18 months away from this speed being in everyone's hands. I'm constantly thinking about how this will change the world and entrepreneurship.

Packed schedules and complexity often force us to be a mile wide and an inch deep. If you're willing to learn, there is an immense opportunity to go a mile wide AND a mile deep.

📰 AI News I've Been Thinking About

• Video cloning is wild. Warning - This is not Robert Wray. I'm not sure what to do with it yet, but that is a video version of this newsletter narrated by the AI clone of yours truly. Or I asked two AIs to make a video podcast on the content discussed here. Link
• How Fast is AI moving? Expect the intelligence and quality of output to improve fivefold over the current results. More: "Humanity's Last Exam," created by safety researchers, aims to challenge advanced AI systems with roughly 3,000 expert-crafted, PhD-level questions across various fields, though current AI models are performing poorly on it with the highest score being only 8.3%. Expect improvement to a 50% score in 11 months (Via New York Times)
• DeepSeek, the new, low-cost, world-class Chinese AI model knocked a half a trillion dollars off Nvidia's market cap. I find this fascinating for a few reasons: A) AI will likely be in the hands of the many and won't be controlled by a few people. B) Open source models have no safety guardrails. Insert the most horrific question you can think of and the AI will answer it, especially if you run the model on your own computer. Some are trying to ban DeepSeek. Sorry folks, this genie doesn't go back in the bottle. Just like 3D gun printing, you can easily download this software and run it on your home computer.
• Google's new AI that watches and guides you while you work. I've found it helpful when you're learning new software or diving into complex spreadsheets. It's a Zoom with AI that can read your screen. https://aistudio.google.com/app/live - but this will have broad implications for other computer vision applications
• AI as a robo trader: Sopheva uses prompt-based agents. Here is someone applying the same strategy to a hedge fund robo trader. And they made it open source.
• Give AI the keys to your computer? Anthropic can control your keyboard and mouse. (see slide 17)
• Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick does a good job breaking down the capabilities of various models and has a few good image generation comparisons in his recent newsletter: Turn on imags to see the preview:

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Personal Items

• Education, our kids & AI: Preparing Our Children for an AI World With No Manual. I'm on the board of my daughter's school and I wrote this essay for the national newsletter which will be published this week. Read the essay here.
• AI In Medicine: One of the Hopkins AI medical companies I advise was in the news. Congrats Therese! They use an iPhone and AI to detect strep throat. They are leading the charge of how diagnostics will move to the home and your phone. Think Star Trek tricorders. Coming soon to your pocket.
• Rob in the news: I did a podcast with AI Expert & Business Coach Chad Harvey and another podcast with Julie Gammack on AI today and tomorrow - Listen here.

🛡️ Sopheva Security & Data Details

• Sopheva is still an alpha product which has bugs. I make no guarantees on the system security, however, I am very much attempting to build this in a best practice way.
• I use a world-class security product called Clerk authentication for login and security. HTTPS is used for secure data transfer, and things that are uploaded are encrypted at rest using AES-256 encryption.
• I log all the data to find bugs, but I'm the only one with access to these logs. If I had another developer to help me, they would be under a strict confidentiality contract. All the logs and reporting are encrypted under two-factor authentication.
• Once a report is done and sent via email, it's sent via a secure email system over an encrypted path.
• The AI systems I use, mainly anthropic, do not use this data for training their algorithms. They do not look at the data unless you ask an illegal question like "how do I kill as many people as possible with $100." This type of question would trigger an investigation by the AI systems to read the logs as they continue to work on AI safety.
• This is a beta app and I haven't had a cybersecurity penetration engineer review the code. Most companies don't have a cybersecurity review until they've raised millions.
• The weakest point of the security for most users may be their email box where they would get their reports.
• If you are concerned, I totally understand. Omit the secret stuff and I bet you can still get a lot of value out of the product.