Alessio Fanelli: belief

Transcript context

…Well, there's a lot of similarities. Yes. Yes. I have a great affinity for companies which are like, um, founder led, customer obsessed and just try and build something great. And I think what deep seek have achieved. There's quite special is they've got this amazing inference engine. They've been able to reduce the size of the KV cash significantly. And then by being able to do that, they're able to significantly reduce their inference costs. And I think with kind of with AI, people get really focused on like the kind of the foundation model or like the model itself. And they sort of don't pay much attention to the inference. To give you an example with Chai, let's say a typical user session is 90 minutes, which is like, you know, is very, very long for comparison. Let's say the average session length on TikTok is 70 minutes. So people are spending a lot of time. And in that time they're able to send say 150 messages. That's a lot of completions, right? It's quite different from an open AI scenario where people might come in, they'll have a particular question in mind. And they'll ask like one question. And a few follow up questions, right? So because they're consuming, say 30 times as many requests for a chat, or a conversational experience, you've got to figure out how to how to get the right balance between the cost of that and the quality. And so, you know, I think with AI, it's always been the case that if you want a better experience, you can throw compute at the problem, right? So if you want a better model, you can just make it bigger. If you want it to remember better, give it a longer context. And now, what open AI is doing to great fanfare is with projection sampling, you can generate many candidates, right? And then with some sort of reward model or some sort of scoring system, you can serve the most promising of these many candidates. And so that's kind of scaling up on the inference time compute side of things. And so for us, it doesn't make sense to think of AI is just the absolute performance. So. But what we're seeing, it's like the MML you score or the, you know, any of these benchmarks that people like to look at, if you just get that score, it doesn't really tell tell you anything. Because it's really like progress is made by improving the performance per dollar. And so I think that's an area where deep seek have been able to form very, very well, surprisingly so. And so I'm very interested in what Lama four is going to look like. And if they're able to sort of match what deep seek have been able to achieve with this performance per dollar gain. Before we go into the inference, some of the deeper stuff, can you give people an overview of like some of the numbers? So I think last I checked, you have like 1. 4 million daily active now. It's like over 22 million of revenue. So it's quite a business. Yeah, I think we grew by a factor of, you know, users grew by a factor of three last year. Revenue over doubled. You know, it's very exciting. We're competing with some really big, really well funded companies. Character AI got this, I think it was almost a $3 billion valuation. And they have 5 million DAU is a number that I last heard. Torquay, which is a Chinese built app owned by a company called Minimax. They're incredibly well funded. And these companies didn't grow by a factor of three last year. Right. And so when you've got this company and this team that's able to keep building something that gets users excited, and they want to tell their friend about it, and then they want to come and they want to stick on the platform. I think that's very special. And so last year was a great year for the team. And yeah, I think the numbers reflect the hard work that we put in. And then fundamentally, the quality of the app, the quality of the content, the quality of the content, the quality of the content, the quality of the content, the quality of the content. AI is the quality of the experience that you have. You actually published your DAU growth chart, which is unusual. And I see some inflections. Like, it's not just a straight line. There's some things that actually inflect. Yes. What were the big ones? Cool. That's a great, great, great question. Let me think of a good answer. I'm basically looking to annotate this chart, which doesn't have annotations on it. Cool. The first thing I would say is this is, I think the most important thing to know about success is that success is born out of failures. Right? Through failures that we learn. You know, if you think something's a good idea, and you do and it works, great, but you didn't actually learn anything, because everything went exactly as you imagined. But if you have an idea, you think it's going to be good, you try it, and it fails. There's a gap between the reality and expectation. And that's an opportunity to learn. The flat periods, that's us learning. And then the up periods is that's us reaping the rewards of that. So I think the big, of the growth shot of just 2024, I think the first thing that really kind of put a dent in our growth was our backend. So we just reached this scale. So we'd, from day one, we'd built on top of Google's GCP, which is Google's cloud platform. And they were fantastic. We used them when we had one daily active user, and they worked pretty good all the way up till we had about 500,000. It was never the cheapest, but from an engineering perspective, man, that thing scaled insanely good. Like, not Vertex? Not Vertex. Like GKE, that kind of stuff? We use Firebase. So we use Firebase. I'm pretty sure we're the biggest user ever on Firebase. That's expensive. Yeah, we had calls with engineers, and they're like, we wouldn't recommend using this product beyond this point, and you're 3x over that. So we pushed Google to their absolute limits.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.