William Beauchamp
Founder & CEO, Chai AI · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveanalyst@William97618843 ↗LinkedIn ↗chai-research.com ↗
William Beauchamp is the founder and CEO of Chai AI, a conversational AI platform for interacting with character-based language models. A Cambridge-educated former competitive poker player, he previously founded the algorithmic sports trading firm Seamless Capital before launching Chai in 2021.
35statements → 14claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.74/5average certainty → 2.34/5average debate potential →
3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 10 not checkable as stated how the 14 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 predictions · 12 assertions · 2 opinions · 13 insights · 5 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 14 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 10 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how William argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Beauchamp: DeepSeek slashes inference costs by shrinking KV cache
“What DeepSeek have achieved that's quite special is they've got this amazing inference engine. They've been able to reduce the size of the KV cache significantly. And then by being able to do that, they're able to significantly reduce their inference costs.”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of William Beauchamp on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything William Beauchamp said on Latent Space that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Beauchamp: ML model performance plateaus near human-level on an S-curve
“With machine learning, first of all, you see that the performance of the models follows an S-curve. So it's not like it just goes off to infinity, right? And the S curve, it kind of plateaus around human level performance.”
Beauchamp: Timeline for AGI has certainly been pushed out
“I think the odds, the timeline for AGI has certainly been pushed out, right?”
Beauchamp: Crypto's only killer use cases are gambling and evading regulations
“As far as a gambling device is like the most fun form of gambling invented in like ever. Super fun. I thought as a way to evade monetary regulations and banking restrictions, I think it's also absolutely amazing. So it has two like Killer use cases.”
Beauchamp: AI future belongs to distributed specialized platforms, not monoliths
“There must exist a platform where a small team can produce an AI for a unique purpose and they can iterate and build the best thing for that.”
Beauchamp: AI content should be created and trained by users, not Silicon Valley
“The number one problem for users in AI is this. All the AI is being generated by middle-aged men in Silicon Valley, right? That's all the content. You're interacting with this AI. You're speaking to it for 90 minutes on average. It's being trained by a middle-…”
Beauchamp: Dynamic LLM routing is expensive and offers minimal performance edge
“You can try and do, like, a routing thing where you say, for a user, given user requests, we're going to try and predict which of these end models that users enjoy the most. That turns out to be pretty expensive and not a huge source of, like, edge or improvem…”
Beauchamp: Randomly blending specialized LLMs delivers an effective 80/20 user experience
“How do you get the user an experience that is both smart and funny? Well, just 50% of the requests, you can serve them the smart model, 50% of the requests, you serve them the funny model... The eighty-twenty solution, if you just do that, you get a pretty pow…”
Beauchamp: LLMs are next-token simulators, not reasoning engines
“The models have proven to just be far worse at reasoning than people sort of thought, and I think whenever I hear people talk about LLMs as reasoning engines, I sort of cringe a bit. I don't think that's what they are. I think of them more as like a simulator.”
Beauchamp: Global AI Optimization Works Better Than Audience Segmentation
“The thing I'm just trying to share here is there's one surprising thing about humans is their preferences are pretty correlated. What you find funny and entertaining, I find funny and entertaining, and he finds funny and entertaining. There might be degrees of…”
Beauchamp: Almost no 2010s ML reached superhuman performance except AlphaGo
“There was almost nothing that went superhuman except for something like AlphaGo.”
Beauchamp: AI is 10x better at non-judgmental conversation than informative tasks
“The thing that AI is 10 X better at is a sort of a conversation Right? That's not intrinsically informative, but is more about an opportunity. You can say whatever you want. You're not going to get judged. If it's three AM, you don't have to wait for your frie…”
Beauchamp: Interacting with AI prevents the post-consumption remorse of social media
“With old school social media, you're just consuming passively, right? So you'll just swipe. If I'm watching TikTok, just like swipe and swipe and swipe. And even though I'm getting the dopamine of like watching an engaging video, there's this other thing that'…”
Beauchamp: Chai unlocked growth by letting consumers build bots with GPT-J
“The realization that developers and software engineers aren't interested in building this sort of AI, but the consumers are. Right. And rather than me trying to guess every day, like what's the right bot to submit to the platform? Why don't we just create the …”
Beauchamp: DeepSeek slashes inference costs by shrinking KV cache
“What DeepSeek have achieved that's quite special is they've got this amazing inference engine. They've been able to reduce the size of the KV cache significantly. And then by being able to do that, they're able to significantly reduce their inference costs.”
Beauchamp: Chai users average 90-minute sessions and 150 messages
“With Chai, let's say a typical user session is 90 minutes, which is like, you know, is very, very long. For comparison, let's say the average session length on TikTok is 70 minutes. So people are spending a lot of time, and in that time they're able to send, s…”
Beauchamp: 5-person Chai AI team ships over 100 LLMs per week
“Every day we're able to, I mean, we evaluate between 20 and 50 models, LLMs, every single day, right? So even though we've got, only got a team of, say, five AI researchers, they're able to iterate a huge quantity of LLMs, right? So our team ships, let's just …”
Beauchamp: Chai spends $40,000 daily on paid user acquisition
“Right now we're spending 40,000 dollars a day on user acquisition. That's still only half of what, like, Character AI or Talkie may be spending.”
Beauchamp: AI adoption is a 20-year journey akin to the web in 1998
“Look, it's going to be a 20 year journey and we're in like year four or it's like the web and this is like 1998 or something. You know, you've got a long, long way to go before the amazon.coms are like these huge multi-trillion dollar businesses that every sin…”
Beauchamp: Training LLMs to swear makes them 20% funnier
“If you give me any LLM,
I can make it 20% funnier just by training it to throw in swear words.”
Beauchamp: Spotify would retain 85% of users with only five artists
“At the end of the day, if we all go on like Spotify or like, imagine if Spotify only had the top five musicians, I think it would retain over 85% of its existing users.”
Beauchamp: AI intelligence is generative LLMs combined with tree search
“I think if you want to talk about what would intelligence look like, it looks much more like tree search. Combining the generative nature of these LLMs with a really good tree search. And that's what opening I've done with O-one and O-three.”
Beauchamp: Small trading funds hold an advantage exploiting niche market anomalies
“If you have a fund of ten million dollars, if you find a little anomaly in the market that you might be able to make a hundred K a year from, that's a one percent return on your ten million fund. If your fund is a hundred K, that's a hundred percent return, ri…”
Beauchamp: Chai reached 100,000 DAUs as top App Store AI app
“I think in even 20, I think late twenty-twenty-two, was it late twenty-twenty-two or maybe early twenty-twenty-three, Chai was like the number one AI app in the app store. So we would have something like a 100,000 daily active users.”
Beauchamp: Real AI progress is performance per dollar, not raw benchmarks
“For us, it doesn't make sense to think of AI as just the absolute performance. So if you look at like the MMLU score or the, you know, any of these benchmarks that people like to look at, If you just get that score, it doesn't really tell, tell you anything. C…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Outlasting Noam Shazeer, Crowdsourcing Chai AI w/ 1.4m DAU — with William Beauchamp, Chai | Jan 26, 2025 | 59m |