Giving AI a human soul

NEXT with John Koetsier · Feb 27, 2026 · 27m

Can we give an AI human emotions? A soul? Can AI truly feel, or will it just act like it does?

In this episode of TechFirst, I talk with Vishnu Hari, founder and CEO of Ego AI (backed by Y Combinator and former AI product manager at Meta), about building emotionally intelligent AI characters that persist across games, Discord, chat, and even physical robots.

Vishnu survived a violent attack in San Francisco that left him partially blind with a traumatic brain injury. During recovery, as he felt his own neural pathways healing, he began asking a deeper question:

If humans are “applied math,”…