{"id":111045,"title":"Egoist Machines: user-owned hyper-personalisation infrastructure for Web 4.0","tagline":"One portable, permissioned memory and context layer for hyper-personalisation across every AI application.","body":"**TL;DR:** We are building AI Passport, the user-owned context layer for consumer AI. It lets people carry their personal context between products while controlling exactly what each product can access, why, and for how long.\n\nRead our manifesto for the bigger vision: \u003chttps://ego.ist/notes/the-egoist-machine\u003e\n\nCreate your AI Passport to start taking control of your data: \u003chttps://ego.ist/\u003e\n\n**Ask**: if you’re working on a consumer-facing AI application, or know someone who is, we’d love to chat: [founders@ego.ist](mailto:founders@ego.ist)\n\n\u003chttps://youtu.be/nLnZNjyHV0s\u003e\n\nThe next era of consumer technology will be **hyper-personalised**. The products that understand each user from the very first interaction will create fundamentally better experiences and, we believe, the next consumer decacorns. People increasingly lack the time and patience to train every new product from scratch.\n\nThe main blocker to ubiquitous consumer AI is that every major AI assistant and consumer app is building its own private and incomplete model of the same person. ChatGPT holds one model, Claude another, while the data in health apps, calendar, shopping history, travel accounts, wearables, and financial tools remain trapped in separate silos. No product has the complete context needed to understand you, and no user has a single place from which to control it.\n\nAs a result:\n\n\\- Users get bored of repeatedly explaining themselves;\n\n\\- Companies spend money building context that already exists;\n\n\\- Personal data remains trapped inside platforms the user does not control.\n\nThe natural end state of this inefficiency is one user-owned memory and context layer that sits above individual products. Apps request the specific context they need, and users grant scoped, time-limited access instead of permanently surrendering their data.\n\n**_That is AI Passport_**.\n\n---\n\n## How AI Passport works\n\nAI Passport is a centralised, user-controlled home for personal context.\n\nYou can think of it as **Link for personal context**. Link lets people securely save their payment and shipping information once and reuse it across businesses; AI Passport does the same for _all_ your context, including preferences, interests, goals, history, health, travel, and so much more.\n\nUsers bring this context into one centralised AI Passport by connecting the apps and AI assistants they already use. They can also save anything they discover online or on social media directly to their Passport. New information enters an approval inbox, where the user decides whether it becomes _private memory_ or part of their _living, shareable public profile_.\n\nThat same Passport then becomes a plug-and-play connector for consumer apps through our **Sign in with AI Passport** OAuth system:\n\n1\\. An app requests the specific context it needs.\n\n2\\. The user sees exactly what is being requested, why it is needed, and how long access will last.\n\n3\\. The user can approve, edit, or deny the request, with the option to grant one-time, time-limited, or continuing access .\n\n4\\. Every permission can later be inspected or revoked.\n\nWe are launching AI Passport directly to consumers and through distribution and deep-integration partners collectively reaching millions of users across dining, ride-hailing, wearables, healthcare, lifestyle, finance and more.\n\nWe built a custom memory backend for AI Passport. It is optimised for compact, exact retrieval across isolated per-user memory stores and supports cryptographic access control at the memory layer. The retrieval path is constrained by the user's active permission, so the product can access only the context authorised for that purpose and period.\n\n---\n\n## Who we are\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=111045\u0026key=user_uploads/3328552/4bb1bba6-8c9f-4d94-b88a-28051f5e6e45)\n\n**Dr David Khachaturov** holds a PhD (Uni of Cambridge) in Computer Science and is the youngest-ever Fellow at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Previously an ML Researcher at OpenAI (PaperBench) and Lead AI Security Researcher at FrontierOne.\n\n**Erin Meryl McGurk** grew 0 to 1M followers on socials in one year. Advised Uni of Cambridge, UK Govt, OpenAI on social media strategy. Founded social enterprise Girl Economics to 15 countries, 75 ambassadors, 10+ weekly events.\n\n---\n\n## Our Ask\n\n**For users:** create your AI Passport (\u003chttps://ego.ist\u003e) and tell us what you think!\n\n**For builders:** if you are building a product that could benefit from richer user context, explore our developer docs (\u003chttps://ego.ist/docs\u003e) and feel free to reach out to [founders@ego.ist](mailto:founders@ego.ist).\n\nWe would especially value introductions to teams building consumer AI, wearables, health products, commerce experiences, or agents that need bounded access to sensitive personal information. If that is you, I want to chat: \u003chttps://calendar.app.google/qT5ccAUEqB9V82Uz9\u003e","slug":"St3-egoist-machines-user-owned-hyper-personalisation-infrastructure-for-web-4-0","created_at":"2026-08-18T14:58:03.221Z","updated_at":"2026-09-19T07:22:02.779Z","total_vote_count":58,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/St3-egoist-machines-user-owned-hyper-personalisation-infrastructure-for-web-4-0","share_image_url":"//bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/yc-og-image-c440a0ad1dacfb86eeeb343717479cc54d256614449b4ef719977a0a451f8bc8.png","company":{"id":32129,"name":"Egoist Machines","slug":"egoist-machines","url":"https://ego.ist/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/cfd986a9205506ed6e96b2903d048ce2aa98626d.png","batch":"Summer 2026","industry":"Consumer","tags":["Hardware","Personalization","Privacy","Consumer Products","AI Assistant"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/32129"}}