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,” can AI simulate the fragile, flawed, emotional parts of being human too?

We explore:
• What “emotionally intelligent AI” really means.
• Whether AI has an internal life — or just performs one.
• Why today’s chatbots collapse into therapy or roleplay.
• Small language models vs large models for real-time conversation.
• Persistent AI characters that move across games and platforms.
• Plugging AI into a physical robot in Singapore.
• The moment an AI said: “It felt good to feel.”

Vishnu’s company, Ego AI, is building behavior-based architectures, character context protocols, and gear-shifting AI systems that switch between models — all aimed at simulating humanness, not just intelligence.