Beauchamp: Chai unlocked growth by letting consumers build bots with GPT-J
William Beauchamp · Outlasting Noam Shazeer, Crowdsourcing Chai AI w/ 1.4m DAU — with William Beauchamp, Chai Research · Jan 26, 2025 · at 18:06
William Beauchamp, founder and CEO of Chai AI, recounts how pivoting from developer APIs to consumer-facing bot creation tools catalyzed Chai AI's growth.
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“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 tools for the users to build it themselves? And so nowadays, this is like the most obvious thing in the world, but when Chai first did it was not an obvious thing at all. Right. And so we took an API for, let's just say it was, I think it was GPTJ, which was the six billion parameter open source transformer style LLM. We took GPTJ. We let users create the prompt. We let users select the image, and we let users choose the name, and then that was the bot.”
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