Life after death as avatar, promised by a Romanian entrepreneur and a MIT team

Cristina Blanaru Digital & Media

Romanian entrepreneur Marius Ursache, co-founder and Chief Design Officer Grapefruit, and a team of  Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) entrepreneurs working for Entrepreneurship Development Program launched together the start-up Eterni.me, a revolutionary digital platform.

Based on AI, Eterni.me will collect all data generated by a person during his lifetime and will generate an avatar that can simulate the interaction of a person with others even after that person dies.

Eterni.me was created as a solution for the desire to remain in the memory of the close ones and to send ideas and advices to the future generations. The platform is based on AI algorithms that will generate a digital alter-ego that will work based on digital data and info generated during the lifetime – from photos to emails, posts on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

During his lifetime, the owner of the alter-ego will be able to adjust the knowledge and even the personality of his avatar. Although it’s just in prototype stage, Eterni.me was already accessed by over 55,000 users in just 4 days since the website was launched and the number of those that applied for the testing period is of over 3,000 after just one week.

Eterni.me is trying to solve, in a different way, a frequent problem – once we die, a big part of what we created or thought during our lifetime is lost. We aim to keep as much of what one is and to offer the future generations the possibility to access information in an as authentic as possible way.

We received extremely diverse reactions when we announced our intentions – from people that offered us instantly access to their personal data to menaces and curses over email or on different websites. I know very well that it is a controversial subject and many see a blasphemy or an attack to humanity in this initiative, but this technology will become reality sooner or later, nobody is doubting that. What is not known for now is when and who will make this possible

Marius Ursache. 

A beta version of Eterni.me will be available starting 2015, exclusively on invitation. The platform will target initially US, both because of the positive reactions received here and also due to the tech capabilities more advances for English language. In the next period, Marius and his team will focus on the beta version, that will provide the proof of concept, and on obtaining the financing to allow accelerating the process.

Based on life after death, a recurring theme in books or SciFi movies, Eterni.me is the first approach of the theme in the real world that has the chance to be economically viable, although tech needs more progress to offer the sensation of an authentic human interlocutor.

The idea was brought into reality by Marius together with a team of 7 entrepreneurs, software engineers and designers, as part of Entrepreneurship Development Program from MIT.