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. Founded in 2021 by William Beauchamp, CHAI build a social AI platform using

large language models A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with Self-supervised learning, self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially Natural language generation, language g ...

(LLMs). The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

History

The origins of CHAI trace back to 2020 in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

, where William Beauchamp began developing the initial prototype with his sister. The company officially launched in 2021 and later relocated to

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

to scale its operations in the heart of

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

. 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.

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. 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.

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). CHAI also includes built-in safety and content moderation systems to maintain community standards while supporting dynamic and imaginative user interactions.

Controversies

In December 2024, the

Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

reported that authorities in

Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

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.

References

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