Chai AI

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. ^[1] Founded in 2021 by William Beauchamp, CHAI build a social AI platform using large language models (LLMs).^{[2] [3]} The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Chai AI

Company type	Private
Industry	Artificial intelligence
Founded	January 2021; 4 years ago (January 2021)
Founder	William Beauchamp
Headquarters	Palo Alto, California , US
Website	chai-research.com

History

The origins of CHAI trace back to 2020 in Cambridge, United Kingdom, where William Beauchamp began developing the initial prototype with his sister.^[4] The company officially launched in 2021 and later relocated to Palo Alto to scale its operations in the heart of Silicon Valley.^[5]

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.^[6]

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. ^[7]

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. ^[8]

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).^[9]

CHAI also includes built-in safety and content moderation systems to maintain community standards while supporting dynamic and imaginative user interactions.^[10][11]

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.^[12]

See also

• Artificial human companion
• Character.ai – AI chatbot service
• ChatGPT – Generative AI chatbot by OpenAI
• Poe – Chatbot platform developed by Quora