CHAI is a consumer platform where people build their own AI characters and stories and chat with them. It launched on the App Store in November 2022 and says it was the first consumer AI platform that let users create their own chat characters. The company trains its own language models for social and engagement purposes, using reinforcement learning from user signals, reward models and a technique it calls model blending, which ensembles different models at the conversation level. It reports serving over a million daily active users on a GPU cluster of 1.4 exaflops, and says funding to date exceeds $55 million.
The main audience is people who want an entertaining AI companion or character to talk with, including fans of interactive stories and roleplay. Creators who like to design a character with a personality and watch it develop in conversation fit well. The company's roadmap is also aimed at readers who follow applied machine learning: engineers and researchers can see how engagement and retention improved with larger models, preference optimization and custom GPU orchestration. Investors and job seekers are pointed to the careers and funding pages, while mobile users can find CHAI on the App Store, where it began.
Day to day, users open the app, create a character, and carry on a conversation or story that the model continues with them. The company's published milestones show its research approach: a first in-house 6B model in February 2023, later upgrades to 13B and 24B models, and later mixture-of-experts work with large 235B-parameter models. Custom CUDA kernels and a model mesh orchestrator serve hundreds of models in production. The page reports reaching $100M in annual recurring revenue, which indicates a large active user base for character chat and story creation.
