Chai AI
{{Short description|AI platform}}
{{Infobox company
| name = Chai AI
| logo = Chai Logo.svg
| type = Private
| industry = Artificial intelligence
| founded = {{Start date and age|January 2021}}
| hq_location_city = Palo Alto, California
| hq_location_country = US
| founder = William Beauchamp
| website = {{URL|https://chai-research.com}}
| registration = required
}}
CHAI (also known as CHAI Research, CHAI AI) is an American artificial intelligence (AI) company that develops and operates a social AI platform enabling users to interact with AI chatbots. {{Cite news |last=Panico |first=Bella |date=29 January 2023 |title=Hello, Sheila! |url=https://yale-herald.com/2023/01/29/hello-sheila/ |access-date=11 March 2025 |work=The Yale Herald}} Founded in 2021 by William Beauchamp, CHAI build a social AI platform using large language models (LLMs).{{Cite web |last=Maring |first=Joseph |date=2 July 2023 |title=Chai App: What Is The AI Bot Chat App & How Does It Work? |url=https://screenrant.com/chai-app-chat-ai-bots-how-work/ |access-date=11 March 2025 |website=Screen Rant |language=en}} The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
History
The origins of CHAI trace back to 2020 in Cambridge, United Kingdom, where William Beauchamp began developing the initial prototype with his sister.{{Cite web |title=CHAI |url=https://www.chai-research.com/ |access-date=11 March 2025 |website=Chai}} The company officially launched in 2021 and later relocated to Palo Alto to scale its operations in the heart of Silicon Valley.{{cite web |last1=Scialom |first1=Mike |title=Chai Research moves chatbot company from Cambridge to Palo Alto |date=20 October 2022 |url=https://www.cambridgeindependent.co.uk/business/chai-research-moves-chatbot-company-from-cambridge-to-palo-a-9279920/}}
CHAI was one of the first companies to deploy an LLM-based consumer chat application, initially leveraging the open-source GPT-J model. It became the first consumer AI product to reach one million users prior to the widespread adoption of ChatGPT or Meta’s LLaMA.{{cite web |last1=Swyx |first1=Shawn |title=How Chai Built the #1 Generative AI App by Doing Everything Different |website=Latent Space |date=19 December 2023 |url=https://www.latent.space/p/chai}}
AI Platform
The CHAI platform allows users to create and interact with AI chatbots, which are designed with distinct personalities. These chatbots are user-generated AI (UGAI) and can be published to the platform, where others can search, discover, and chat with them. {{cite web |title=Chai AI Review – Features, Safety, and User Experience |url=https://www.fahimai.com/chai-ai |website=Fahimai |date=15 July 2024 |access-date=6 June 2025}}
A core focus of CHAI is on social AI—chatbots that prioritize entertainment, emotional engagement, and interactive storytelling. Users often use CHAI to co-author fictional narratives, simulate dialogue-driven games, or simply engage in conversation with characters across a range of genres. {{cite web |title=Chai AI Review – Features, Safety, and User Experience |url=https://www.fahimai.com/chai-ai |website=Fahimai |date=15 July 2024 |access-date=6 June 2025}}
Technology
CHAI uses proprietary and open-source large language models fine-tuned for human preference alignment and conversational depth. The platform incorporates advanced sampling strategies, including best-of-N sampling and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) variants such as DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) and SimPO (Similarity Preference Optimization).{{cite arXiv|eprint=2303.06135 |class=cs.CL |title=Rewarding Chatbots for Real-World Engagement with Millions of Users |last1=Irvine |first1=Robert |last2=Boubert |first2=Douglas |last3=Raina |first3=Vyas |last4=Liusie |first4=Adian |last5=Zhu |first5=Ziyi |last6=Mudupalli |first6=Vineet |last7=Korshuk |first7=Aliaksei |last8=Liu |first8=Zongyi |last9=Cremer |first9=Fritz |last10=Assassi |first10=Valentin |last11=Beauchamp |first11=Christie-Carol |last12=Lu |first12=Xiaoding |last13=Rialan |first13=Thomas |last14=Beauchamp |first14=William |date=2023 }}
CHAI also includes built-in safety and content moderation systems to maintain community standards while supporting dynamic and imaginative user interactions.{{cite arXiv |eprint=2306.02979 |class=cs.AI|title=The Chai Platform's AI Safety Framework |last1=Lu |first1=Xiaoding |last2=Korshuk |first2=Aleksey |last3=Liu |first3=Zongyi |last4=Beauchamp |first4=William |date=2023 }}{{cite web |title=Chai AI Review – Features, Safety, and User Experience |url=https://www.fahimai.com/chai-ai |website=Fahimai |date=15 July 2024 |access-date=6 June 2025}}
Controversies
In December 2024, the Washington Post reported that authorities in Belgium launched an investigation into the company following a complaint. The investigation started in July 2024, after a Dutch man died by suicide following extensive chats on the Chai app.{{cite news |date=6 December 2024 |title=AI friendships claim to cure loneliness. Some are ending in suicide. |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/06/ai-companion-chai-research-character-ai/ |access-date=11 March 2025 |newspaper=The Washington Post}}
See also
- Artificial human companion
- {{annotated link|Character.ai}}
- {{annotated link|ChatGPT}}
- Poe – Chatbot platform developed by Quora
References
{{reflist}}
External links
- {{Official website|https://chai-research.com/|name=Chai Website}}