Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedShawn Wang: belief
26 Jan 2025 Latent Space Outlasting Noam Shazeer, crowdsourcing Chai AI with >1.4m DAU, and becoming the "Western DeepSeek" — with William Beauchamp, Chai Research
“I think there's a lot of inference insights that we can get from that, as well as human psychology insights, kind of a weird blend of the two.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Shawn Wang
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 26 Jan 2025
- Publisher
- Latent Space
Transcript context
…Yep, so I was simultaneously running an algorithmic trading company, but I fortunately was able to kind of exit from that, I think just in Q3 last year. Yeah, congrats. Yeah, thanks. So Chai has always been on my radar because, well, first of all, you do a lot of advertising, I guess, in the Bay Area, so it's working. Yep. And second of all, the reason I reached out to a mutual friend, Joyce, was because I'm just generally interested in the... ...consumer AI space, chat platforms in general. I think there's a lot of inference insights that we can get from that, as well as human psychology insights, kind of a weird blend of the two. And we also share a bit of a history as former finance people crossing over. I guess we can just kind of start it off with the origin story of Chai. Why decide working on a consumer AI platform rather than B2B SaaS? So just quickly touching on the background in finance. Sure. Originally, I'm from... I'm from the UK, born in London. And I was fortunate enough to go study economics at Cambridge. And I graduated in 2012. And at that time, everyone in the UK and everyone on my course, HFT, quant trading was really the big thing. It was like the big wave that was happening. So there was a lot of opportunity in that space. And throughout college, I'd sort of played poker. So I'd, you know, I dabbled as a professional poker player. And I was able to accumulate this sort of, you know, say $100,000 through playing poker. And at the time, as my friends would go work at companies like ChangeStreet or Citadel, I kind of did the maths. And I just thought, well, maybe if I traded my own capital, I'd probably come out ahead. I'd make more money than just going to work at ChangeStreet.…
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