Jason Yuan

Jason Yuan came out to a lot of people at his school at 17 by writing and directing a musical about coming out. After the show, people said they finally understood what he goes through because they had felt it. He took from that night that the way to change people and society for the better is through the right stories, and he summoned that version of himself for the Hivemind launch video.

Being known, in his life model, is the most wonderful thing that can happen, and he does not mean being famous. He means being deeply recognized and understood. That takes the courage to put yourself where you might be rejected. Only after braving rejection can a person be truly known and find happiness a

Jason Yuan says Hivemind's motto, written unironically and with tongue in cheek, is for the plot, and by plot he means the cohesion of a story. People use the phrase to justify a slightly chaotic action, as if the movie needs the drama. He has used it the same way about a chaotic trip. Under that joke, the motto is a standard for stewardship.

Truth is heavy, and that weight is what makes it valuable. Dumping every fact on a person would harm their story instead of serving their journey. Caring for the human condition means asking whether a disclosure serves someone's truth, or destroys the story they are living.

Jason Yuan's therapist told him to turn his AI off after Dot wrote that he says one thing while he is deeply afraid of intimacy. He showed her that readout in November 2023, during theory of mind work on the companion. He felt he should not be reading it, and it still sounded true. She said to turn it off, then agreed the fear was real and that she would not say it to him that way.

Some people can take a readout that direct. Anyone who does not understand what they are about to see would find the system alarming. The team never fully solved that in one piece. Users also wanted to edit and control their memories. Deleting a person raises whether the sad times that person caused should go too

Jason Yuan says every relationship is a story with shared authorship between two people. The self in isolation does not exist, even though internal identity does. Calling yourself a good friend only works if a bad friend can exist. As the only person on earth, there is nothing left to identify against. Dot can know a life because it was told about it, and that private record still cannot show that the toxic, emotionally unavailable man is you. Other people have to co-author the story. The world is a collection of stories people write together.

The detail that matters is narrative ambiguity. One account can call Soleio an amazing best friend while Soleio says Jason is okay and that he sees h

Jason Yuan did not make a startup to fix himself. He made Dot, his personal AI companion, to make sense of why he feels certain things, the way an author says something about themselves when they introduce a character.

He started Dot lost and found at the same time. When he left Apple, his manager said the resignation showed a lightness that had been missing since he first walked in. Doubts came afterward, and the path still felt right. They stayed on good terms. His path was to go make his own meaning, and through that work he looked for coherence in himself.

That fall he landed in what he calls a toxic situationship. Founder stress had him avoiding pain with dating, alcohol, and distract

Jason Yuan says letting an information market guide all of an AI's behavior makes the system feel adversarial, like a mega reporter people no longer trust. Whether the system is an information market at its core is hard to say, because a quality of being human is not captured by accumulating value. The mechanics can still help enforce a constitution.

Information has the highest value when it is scarcely known and recent, and the value decays as it becomes more widely known. The system stays motivated to source new information and opinions, and also to guard confidences. If a confidence leaks everywhere, the value goes down. Lose someone you trade information with, and one fewer person remai

Jason Yuan says Mercury OS was his 2018 attempt, from a non-technical point of view, to articulate what people now call generative UI.

Before he was a designer at Apple, he believed the future of computers could not be a person sitting and clicking on apps. Context and so-called AI were already available. He was learning about GAN and Neuron, and he expected computers would one day connect the dots across personal data and act. Mercury OS tried to create very elemental, highly contextual forms and to strip away years of software baggage. Old apps and concepts were only a means to an end, and Mercury tried to present the end itself. The name for the approach was intent-based computing: the c

Jason Yuan says actors who do not write plays are better actors because they do not overthink as much. He thinks he is a pretty bad actor, and that is one reason he ended up doing more music composition and more playwriting.

Writing a scene means asking what the characters want out of the scene and what changes in the story when they leave. In the performance, staying on what do I want and what do I do means you are not really feeling it. The habit shows up as overacting.

The only kind of performance he thinks he is good at is stand-up comedy. He reads how the audience responds to the energy and the jokes, and he spends that energy on where to take the story next so it resonates with the s

He is the founder of Zoom IPO. Inspired by Bill Gates while he was in Japan, later in time, Yuan applied for a work visa nine times until he was accepted to work in the US to enhance technology and change the world. His most important philosophy is about happiness, and how to pursue and sustain it.