Unlike traditional virtual assistants, Second Me reconstructs the human-machine relationship in the AI era, and this product is turning “digital twins into substantive functions” from imagination to reality. This article will analyze Second Me’s technical architecture, product experience, and open source strategy, exploring how it redefines identity sovereignty in the digital age and the profound impact of this change on the relationship between humanity and technology.
In early 2025, there was a striking turning point in the field of AI applications – personal AI twins moved from laboratories to large-scale applications. Unlike traditional virtual assistants or chatbots, the expectation of a new generation of digital twins is to begin to take on substantial social and work functions: attending secondary meetings, maintaining social connections, and even collaborating creatively.
The landmark event of this transformation was the explosive growth of Second Me on GitHub launched by Mindverse – gaining 10K+ stars in just 3 weeks and over 1,000 forks, making it one of the fastest-growing open-source AI projects in 2025.
The latest report from ResearchAndMarkets simultaneously shows that the AI Avatar market is experiencing unprecedented expansion – it is expected to grow from US$800 million in 2025 to US$5.93 billion in 2032, with a compound annual growth rate of 33.1%.
This fast-growing market is emerging products in all forms: from Character.AI’s text avatars to HeyGen’s video avatars, from Replika’s emotional companions to digital employees at Xiaoice companies, developers are pushing AI Avatar into deeper and deeper use cases.
Second Me was the first to successfully commercialize the concept of “Speak for Me”, so let’s take a look at what it did.
01 Technology vision: Reconstructing the human-machine relationship in the AI era
At the heart of Second Me’s innovation lies in the redefinition of human-machine relationships in the era of AI. Founder Tao Fangbo (Tsinghua University, U.S. Ph.D., former Facebook and Alibaba AI researcher) put forward a counterintuitive insight: in the era of superintelligence, instead of replacing humans with AI, create an exclusive AI spokesperson for each unique individual – let technology speak for individuality, and let Second Me show the real you!
This insight translates into three dimensions of value reconstruction:
- Retention Dimension: Through AI-Native Memory technology, personal memories, thoughts, and emotions are transformed into computable and inheritable digital assets, and a sustainable personal knowledge graph is constructed.
- Amplified dimension: Based on a distributed agent architecture, it allows individuals to break through physical and time constraints, such as when you are sleeping, your Second Me can continue to reply to emails, participate in online meetings, or maintain interaction with friends.
- Connection Dimension: Build an authentic and trustworthy AI social network, where each Second Me represents a real personal identity, allowing people to build deeper, more efficient connections through AI clones.
Rather than emphasizing parameter scale or computing power competitions, Second Me’s technology stack focuses on building an “identity model” that truly understands users. This architecture is based on two core technology modules:
- AI-Native Memory System: This is to build the user’s digital memory infrastructure, process text, speech, images, and other data through multimodal fusion technology, and continue to evolve over time. Distributed storage is used to ensure that data sovereignty belongs to users, achieving true “memory privatization”.
- Me-Alignment algorithm: This is the key from “remembering you” to “speaking for you”, that is, accurately capturing users’ expression habits, thinking patterns, and decision-making preferences through deep personalized fine-tuning. Each Second Me has a unique cognitive system that enables qualitative changes from superficial imitation to deep understanding.
And when these values and technological innovations are implemented into products, what exactly do users experience?
02 Product experience: cognitive shift from resistance to acceptance
Initial confusion: Do I really need another “I”?
Frankly, when I first heard about the concept of Second Me, I was resisting inside. In this era, we have been surrounded by too many so-called “self-presentations” – careful planning on social media, persona management in the workplace, and persona switching in various occasions. Create a digital version of yourself? This sounds like adding more burden to an already exhausting life.
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And the deeper reason may be: I don’t “love” myself so much. The general state of contemporary people is that they are busy surviving, tired of coping, and have little time to really examine and appreciate themselves. Creating an AI version of yourself feels like a manifestation of narcissism, but there is a strange “sense of shame”.
The Turning Point of Pragmatism: The Liberation of the Reality Me
However, when I re-evaluate Second Me from an efficiencyist lens, “shame” simply isn’t enough. Imagine if there was another “me” who could handle the repetitive work and even do the initial social screening for me and help me find someone who was really worthy of friendship faster – my first reaction was “that’s great”.
Second Me on-premises training interface
Reference link: https://secondme.gitbook.io/secondme
Here are a few examples of specific scenarios:
- Meeting Agent: Engage Second Me in information-synchronized meetings and generate structured minutes, freeing users from the low-value time trap and focusing on what truly requires creativity and decision-making.
- Content Creation: Personalized writing based on deep learning, from email responses to professional reports, maintains your expressive style, and let Second Me output for you.
- Social Extension: Acts as an intelligent social agent to screen information flows and maintain daily interactions, ensuring that important relationships are not alienated by busyness, while accurately identifying key moments that require personal participation.
- Knowledge management: Structure fragmented thoughts, notes, and experiences into a searchable graph of personal knowledge, building a “second brain” that truly understands your thinking patterns and is ready to serve you.
Also, I’m looking forward to the upcoming Second X Apps. In the introduction of Mindverse, the applications in the Second X Apps ecosystem (such as Second Tinder and Second LinkedIn) are not independent apps in the traditional sense, but are implemented by AI agent protocols based on the Second Me identity system. Similar to the relationship between WeChat mini programs and WeChat, AI clones can act on behalf of users in different scenarios through standardized interfaces.
Official Presentation Demo
The subtlety of this “Identity as a Service” model is that users only need to train a core Second Me to use the protocol adapter to function in vertical scenarios such as dating, workplace, and home rental. Although the specific implementation details have not yet been announced, the intention of this design idea is clear – to make Second Me a unified identity representative for users in the digital world, realizing the vision of “one training, everywhere speaking”.
Unexpected discovery: the multidimensional self refracted by AI clones
What surprised me the most was that when experiencing Mindverse’s mobile product, Me.bot, the process of creating another “me” was not as complicated and uncomfortable as I imagined.
Me.bot’s product design is a gradual conversational interaction that turns what might be uncomfortable into a natural process. Instead of filling out questionnaires or writing autobiographies, we gradually build AI’s understanding of “me” in daily use. In this process, I discovered that knowing oneself systematically can be a burden-free thing.
5 Q&A to easily build another “me”
Second Me’s complete product matrix covers the entire link from personal development to social interaction:
1. Me.bot (Identity Development Platform)
Me.bot is not a simple chat transcription tool, but a multimodal digital memory building platform. Users can continuously “feed” their AI clones through text, voice memos, images, web collections, document uploads, and more. This design breaks the limitations of traditional AI processing most conversational text as memory – after all, the real “I” is much more than just a written expression.
I recorded a delicious grilled salmon snack on Me.bot at noon and found my AI clone thinking about a fantastic metaphor about the “monkey mind” in the evening. The timeline design of the homepage is very cleverly presented with the flow of thought of the “other me” – for the first time, I saw so clearly that my thinking as an ENTP was extended by another agent, and I even had a magical sense of synchronization.
2. Me Talk
“I want to talk to investors about the opportunities and product forms of the AI Avatar track” – with just one sentence, Second Me can generate a full voice video presentation based on my professional identity, explaining industry insights with my way of thinking and personalized style. It doesn’t memorize the data bluntly, but outputs some insights as I usually chat.
3. Remix Talk (Asynchronous Brainstorming)
This feature allows for deep conversations between different users’ Second Me, creating an unprecedented asynchronous social experience.
What I found clever about Remix Talk is that it is designed to turn a serious Brainstorm into a more relaxed chat. “Chat Together” allows multiple AI clones to communicate naturally like a gathering of friends, each with their own background cognition; “Ta said” turned consulting experts into sending WeChat to ask friends – for example, asking Liu Cixin how to write science fiction.
In the future, when you and your friends have Second Me, you may be able to let Second Me arrange a weekend trip that suits your preferences while you are busy with work.
According to agents, Mindverse is building a decentralized AI identity network — making every Second Me an interoperable digital identity node. This open ecosystem will connect various third-party services to seamlessly collaborate with other AI systems, while ensuring cross-platform identity consistency through encryption technology without leaking raw data.
From closed applications to open protocols, from single point intelligence to collaborative networks, it is expected that Second Me’s open ecological strategy will upgrade “speak for me” from a product concept to an identity protocol in the AI world.
03 Deconstruction of the business value of Second Me’s open source strategy
Second Me’s choice of the open-source path (GitHub: Mindverse/Second-Me) represents a differentiated competitive strategy in the AI Avatar space. Through core technical components such as open AI-Native Memory, the project received 10K+ stars and 1000+ forks in 3 weeks, showing good community acceptance.
Behind this rapid growth is the developer community’s recognition of the technological direction of “personalized AI identity”. Different from the large model route that pursues general capabilities, Second Me focuses on the accurate mapping of individual digital identities – a relatively vertical but potential segment.
The open source community not only provides the impetus for technology iteration, but more importantly, builds a decentralized “authentication network” – when more developers build applications based on Second Me, the network effect of the entire ecosystem becomes stronger, eventually forming a virtuous circle of “technical standards are commercial moats”.
The major players in the current AI Avatar market also exhibit distinct differentiated characteristics, specifically:
Note: Character.AI underwent significant changes in 2024, with the founding team partially joining Google; Replika has over 30 million users; Personal AI emphasizes SOC2 compliance and enterprise-grade security.
From the above comparison, it can be seen that the AI Avatar market is undergoing a differentiated evolution from “general conversation” to “vertical scenario”. Every player is looking for their own niche. Unlike Character.AI’s fictional roleplay or Replika’s emotional companionship positioning, Second Me focuses on helping real users build verifiable, inheritable digital identities. The strategic value of this positioning lies in the fact that when AI Agents become mainstream in productivity, AI clones based on real identities may become the foundation of trust for human-machine collaboration.
Perhaps as the founding team foreseen: “2025 is the Year of Agent, 2026 will be the Year of Second Me” – a profound insight into the evolution of AI from tools to identity infrastructure.
04 Answering the Eternal Question: What is Man in the AI Era?
When we talk about “Year of Second Me,” we’re actually exploring a deeper question: What is the unique value of people in an era where AI can “speak for me”?
The answer given by Second Me is: to enhance humanity through technology, not replace it. It allows everyone to be liberated and empowered in the digital world while maintaining their individuality. Technology is not a cold tool, but an extension of human nature; AI is not a potential threat, but a symbiotic partner.
The significance of this digital identity revolution is ultimately to help us reunderstand and redefine what it means to be ourselves.
In this process, Second Me becomes a catalyst for self-discovery and self-realization, rather than an obstacle.
