AI platform Chai established a deal with specialised GPU vendor CoreWeave earlier this month, investing $8 million in GPU compute with a maximum of $450 million. The investment comes several months after Chai received $2 million in a pre-seed round to promote the company’s objective of establishing a more open and democratic AI platform.
CoreWeave’s strategic investment in Chai will enable one of the first large-scale AI language model competitions, in which competitors submit language models in order to compete for user engagement in Chai’s popular entertainment app. Winners of the competition get financial awards as well as the prestige of the title.
It will also enable them to continue improving their in-house technology, which currently outperforms OpenAI’s models on the platform. User engagement, as measured by screen time, is Chai’s north star metric, and their commitment to optimising for this is evident in posts from users who provide screen time figures of more over 10 hours.
Every message sent over the platform is routed through the CoreWeave servers. “They have the best understanding of the inner workings of our business of anyone,” Chai CEO William Beauchamp remarked. “We’re thrilled to be working with them. As our user base expands, so will demand for CoreWeave’s infrastructure services.”
