Episode
Outlasting Noam Shazeer, crowdsourcing Chai AI with >1.4m DAU, and becoming the "Western DeepSeek" — with William Beauchamp, Chai Research
- Published
- Jan 26, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 4546
- Processing state
processed- Canonical source
- https://www.latent.space/p/chai
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Summary
One last Gold sponsor slot is available for the AI Engineer Summit in NYC . Our last round of invites is going out soon - apply here - If you are building AI agents or AI eng teams , this will be the single highest-signal conference of the year for you! While the world melts down over DeepSeek , few are talking about the OTHER notable group of former hedge fund traders who pivoted into AI and built a remarkably profitable consumer AI business with a tiny team with incredibly cracked engineering team — Chai Research . In short order they have: * Started a Chat AI company well before Noam Shazeer started Character AI, and outlasted his departure. * Crossed 1m DAU in 2.5 years - William updates us on the pod that they’ve hit 1.4m DAU now, another +40% from a few months ago. Revenue crossed >$22m . * Launched the Chaiverse model crowdsourcing platform - taking 3-4 week A/B testing cycles down to 3-4 hours, and deploying >100 models a week. While they’re not paying million dollar salaries, you can tell they’re doing pretty well for an 11 person startup: The Chai Recipe: Building infra for rapid evals Remember how the central thesis of LMarena (formerly LMsys) is that the only comprehensive way to evaluate LLMs is to let users try them out and pick winners? At the core of Chai is a mobile app that looks like Character AI, but is actually the largest LLM A/B testing arena in the world, specialized on retaining chat users for Chai’s usecases (therapy, assistant, roleplay, etc). It’s basically what LMArena would be if taken very, very seriously at one company (with $1m in prizes to boot): Chai publishes occasional research on how they think about this, including talks at their Palo Alto office: William expands upon this in today’s podcast (34 mins in): Fundamentally, the way I…