"Blurring Reality" - Chai's Social AI Platform - sponsored
This episode of MLST explores the groundbreaking work of Chai, a social AI platform that quietly built one of the world's largest AI companion ecosystems before ChatGPT's mainstream adoption. With over 10 million active users and just 13 engineers serving 2 trillion tokens per day, Chai discovered the massive appetite for AI companionship through serendipity while searching for product-market fit.
CHAI sponsored this show *because they want to hire amazing engineers* --
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES AT CHAI
Chai is actively hiring in Palo Alto with competitive compensation ($300K-$800K+ equity) for roles including AI Infrastructure Engineers, Software Engineers, Applied AI Researchers, and more. Fast-track qualification available for candidates with significant product launches, open source contributions, or entrepreneurial success.
https://www.chai-research.com/jobs/
The conversation with founder William Beauchamp and engineers Tom Lu and Nischay Dhankhar covers Chai's innovative technical approaches including reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), model blending techniques that combine smaller models to outperform larger ones, and their unique infrastructure challenges running exaflop-class compute.
SPONSOR MESSAGES:
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Tufa AI Labs is a brand new research lab in Zurich started by Benjamin Crouzier focussed on o-series style reasoning and AGI. They are hiring a Chief Engineer and ML engineers in Zurich and SF.
Goto https://tufalabs.ai/
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Key themes explored include:
- The ethics of AI engagement optimization and attention hacking
- Content moderation at scale with a lean engineering team
- The shift from AI as utility tool to AI as social companion
- How users form deep emotional bonds with artificial intelligence
- The broader implications of AI becoming a social medium
We also examine OpenAI's recent pivot toward companion AI with April's new GPT-4o, suggesting a fundamental shift in how we interact with artificial intelligence - from utility-focused tools to companion-like experiences that blur the lines between human and artificial intimacy.
The episode also covers Chai's unconventional approach to hiring only top-tier engineers, their bootstrap funding strategy focused on user revenue over VC funding, and their rapid experimentation culture where one in five experiments succeed.
TOC:
00:00:00 - Introduction: Steve Jobs' AI Vision & Chai's Scale
00:04:02 - Chapter 1: Simulators - The Birth of Social AI
00:13:34 - Chapter 2: Engineering at Chai - RLHF & Model Blending
00:21:49 - Chapter 3: Social Impact of GenAI - Ethics & Safety
00:33:55 - Chapter 4: The Lean Machine - 13 Engineers, Millions of Users
00:42:38 - Chapter 5: GPT-4o Becoming a Companion - OpenAI's Pivot
00:50:10 - Chapter 6: What Comes Next - The Future of AI Intimacy
TRANSCRIPT: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/yz2ewkzmwz9rbbturfbap/CHAI.pdf?rlkey=uuyk2nfhjzezucwdgntg5ubqb&dl=0
Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) 
