Outlasting Noam Shazeer, Crowdsourcing Chat AI w/ 1.4m DAU — with William Beauchamp, Chai Research

In this episode of the Latent Space podcast, Alessio and Swix interview William Beauchamp, the founder of Chai AI, at the Chai AI office. Beauchamp recounts his background in algorithmic trading and how he transitioned to building a consumer AI platform. He shares the origin story of Chai, detailing the initial focus on an API for AI agents and the eventual pivot to a social AI platform driven by user-generated content, sparked by the unexpected popularity of a therapist bot. Beauchamp discusses Chai's growth, competition with Character AI, the importance of customer obsession, and the data flywheel they've built for evaluating and iterating on AI models. He also touches on the significance of inference optimization, rejection sampling, and the future of AI as a generative tool, emphasizing the need for user-generated content to drive variety and engagement.