A few months ago I entered the world’s largest hackathon with over 130,000 competitors. My original project idea had nothing to do with AI memory preservation. I started by building a social commerce platform called OAK where people could upload clothing designs and have them printed onto real garments and shipped. Halfway through the competition I realized I wasn’t emotionally connected to the idea, and honestly it didn’t feel differentiated enough to compete at that scale. One of the hackathon sponsors was Tavus. Around that time I remembered a voice note my uncle sent me before he was killed in Nigeria. For years I replayed that recording during difficult periods of my life. Hearing his voice still carried emotional weight long after he was gone. But eventually I kept thinking about something unsettling: the voice note was static. I could replay it forever, but I could never ask a new question. I could never hear a new story. The memory was frozen in time.…