In the 1990 fantasy drama - Truly, Madly, Deeply, lead character Nina, (Juliet Stevenson), is grieving the recent death of her boyfriend Jamie (Alan Rickman). Sensing her profound sadness, Jamie returns as a ghost to help her process her loss. If you've seen the film, you'll know that his reappearance forces her to question her memory of him and, in turn, accept that maybe he wasn't as perfect as she'd remembered. Here in 2023, a new wave of AI-based "grief tech" offers us all the chance to spend time with loved ones after their death -- in varying forms. But unlike Jamie (who benevolently misleads Nina), we're being asked to let artificial intelligence serve up a version of those we survive.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Deepbrain AI (formerly Moneybrain), a conversational AI startup based in Seoul, South Korea, has raised $44 million in a series B round led by Korea Development Bank at a post-money valuation of $180 million. The capital will be used to expand the company's customer base and operations globally, CEO Eric Jang said in a statement, with a particular emphasis on the U.S. Deepbrain provides a range of AI-powered customer service products, but its focus is on "synthetic humans," or human-like avatars that respond to natural language questions. Because the pandemic makes online meetups a regular occurrence, the concept of "virtual people" is gaining steam. Startups including Soul Machines, Brud, Wave, Samsung-backed STAR Labs, the AI Foundation, and Deepbrain aim to will a sort of "metaverse" into existence by pursuing AI techniques that can mimic the experience of speaking with a human being (for example, a support agent).