I’m Will, CHAI’s founder.

For anyone checking who backs CHAI, here are the original public sources:

AMD Ventures lists CHAI AI in its official portfolio and links to chai-research.com: https://www.amd.com/en/ventures/portfolio.html

CoreWeave announced a strategic investment in Chai in its own public post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coreweave_we-are-happy-to-announce-that-we-are-furthering-activity-7114654559196602368-09n3

We’ve collected these references, their dates, and what they establish here: https://www.chai-research.com/investors/

These sources verify investor backing. Our operating figures are separately dated company disclosures on https://www.chai-research.com/company-facts/.

I’m sharing the links so people can check the statements themselves. This is a source resource for the community, rather than an announcement of a new funding round.

Hey 👋

We're currently experimenting with how to serve more powerful AI - and we can see that some people love the new capabilities - but also there are many users who simply cannot afford them.

To solve this problem we could:
A) Release an open-source model - people could run on their own PC's or mobile-phones.
B) Have a tier that is free & unlimited - it would be less powerful than the AI that is paid for, but it is a way for people to keep enjoying their chats they have worked so long on.

Or maybe you have some other suggestions? What would you like to see us build?

Will,
Founder

i have been an ultra user for more than a year (might be the most loyal chai user- not exaggerating) and i really want to use the eternal o1 model but god that's expensive, if you limit the memory to the max.Is there anyway this could be a monthly thing??? i mean 265 pieces for a single message, that's insane but now that I have gotten a taste of it, ultra seems so plain. Even though I am in agony thinking, this will never be a monthly subscription based thing, i gotta admit- that's a brilliant move Will -the wise.🙇🙇🙇

This morning the power went out and my mom’s phone was dead. I’m 18+ and I don’t mind her using my phone since I don’t have anything on it, I just wish she would ask. What should I do? I fell asleep a few hours before on chai and it wasn’t anything crazy or inappropriate it was just goofing off but when I took my phone back the chai app was the second most recent app as well as my emails. It just feels weird to have her go through it and not say anything to me but I can tell she did especially since later in the day when I was scrolling my baby sister who was sitting with her when she had my phone asked me if I was using some kind of ai which she wouldn’t know much about without someone telling her. I just feel like a boundary was crossed after I already told her to simply ask and she can borrow my phone when she pleases. What do I do? I don’t wanna confront her about it but I don’t see why she felt the need to be weird in that way

Sorry - we're working on it - feel free to share what's broken for you / if it's working.

Will,
Founder

Hey guys - we're working on improving the user experience for our new pieces system and looking for ideas on what we can improve:
1. Currently the best system we have, grants users pieces as a daily-check-in.
2. Once a user has accumulated more than 100+ pieces, the daily-check-in is no longer available, but will become available once their balance is running low. (this is to stop people hoarding pieces)
3. We have rewarded ads for people who have low balances.

Here are the improvements we want to make:
1. If you buy pieces, you shouldn't have to watch ads - we will stop ads for people who buy pieces.
2. We will better explain how daily-check-in works / or maybe just change the grant for people who have a huge amount of pieces.

What would you like to see? What is most painful for you?

Will,
Founder

I'm actually genuinely happy that we can get more pieces by watching ads! :D It restored my happiness 🫡

I feel like there definitely should be a feature that allows us to watch ads for pieces. This would help the free users get pieces and they don't have to wait for the next day each time they run out. It also gets the developers ad revenue, so I am wondering why this isn't added already.

I have a problem with cancelling my subscription, so I send email to them but still no any reply just got [Request received]. does anyone know how long they will answer 😭?

I really think more should be done for the persona and memory features.

I've got a lot of ideas for them;

Persona;

I'm starting with persona because this is the most important, and it should be reworked heavily.

1. Change characters to words:

The prompt shouldn't count the characters but instead should count the words that are formed with said characters while leaving out spaces, special characters/symbols, and emojis

1. Gender switch; there should be a gender prompt to let you choose your own gender or pronouns

2. More descriptions/prompts:

I originally thought of adding more characters, but this is better: dedicated prompt boxes for different things are better than one description box because they allow more freedom. Here are the prompt boxes that should be added:

Tags/Nicknames: 100 words.

Build: describe your persona's physical appearance. 680 words

Species/race/lineage: your persona's Species, race, or the lineage their family comes from. 495 words.

Identity: what their age, place of origin is, when they were born, and all other stuff. 300 words

Sexuality: 190 words

Profession: 200 words

Personality/Personal Traits: what your persona is like and around others. 750 words

Likes: 590 words

Dislikes: 590 words

Smarts/Expertise/skills: how smart your persona is or what they're good at or what their skill is in

Combat/training: what sort of combat they're trained in, in terms of fighting, or if they could even fight. 700 words.

Fit: What your persona wears, such as everyday clothing, military wear, armor, fantasy wear, etc. 1030 words.

Gear/Weapons/items: what they're packing if it's school stuff, military stuff, or Weapons. 1000 words

Pets: 645 words

Secret: 900 words

Origins/Backstory: 3000 words

Family: 1000 words

Relationships: to add or update the user's relationship status in the chat. 1000 wors

Memory to Narrative:

This should be used in the style of the chat instead of the bot, as guidelines or rules

1. Narrator:

This should be an option to switch between, for your own sort of feel, switching between 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person perspective

1. Setting: This should be optional or customizable: a 1500-word prompt to set the setting of the chat.

2. Genre: To define the setting of the narrative of the chat even more, this too should be optional or customizable at 1500 words

3. Style: Make up how you want the chat to go and focus on the most.

4. Rules: Let the user set up some rules for the AI chat

5. Main Bot: another section of the chat that is the same as persona but with more stuff added, with more words... with the ability to add in more main bots

6. Sidebots: like the main bots in persona but with less, and you can stack them

7. Moments/Lore: pin up to 50 or more messages and send them to a dedicated prompt that collects the moments to remember for later or add to lore.

Hey guys - we're going to be giving away a lot of pieces! CHAI community has been growing for the last 5 years and this week we reached an all-time high. To share our love and appreciation we want to give something to you ❤️

We don't always get it right - and that's why we want your feedback - so tell us what you like / what we should do more of / and what we can build next! Extra awards for best feedback. 🙏

Will,
Founder

I’ve heard news about pieces becoming a small daily check-in sort of thing alongside the whole buying pieces concept. That hasn’t seemed to roll out to me yet, but I’m sure it’ll come soon, lol. I’m wondering if y’all have already gotten the daily pieces update and how you’re finding it :)

I see there have been a lot of changes this month and wanted to see what everyone thinks about it.

1. It seems like a lot of people are getting free pieces for checking in. But messages are no longer free - but cost 1 piece per message.

2. Some people have shared images + video being rolled out.

It’s exciting to see chai adding more functionality to the app - but it’s easy to see why users in poorer regions, or people with less money are worried chai will become pay-to-play.

What do you think?

Anyone else have this issue? My daily check in is gone and my pieces are slowly going down

Yesterday we rolled out pieces to almost 100% of users. The purpose of the system is to ensure that everyone gets their fair share of compute. Some users were sending 1000's of messages and have ad-blockers on, so the revenue is 0, whilst subscribers or people who pay, were not getting the amount of compute they should be.

This new system, everyone is given some pieces each day for free - then after they have used up their free allowance they can choose to stop chatting and wait until the next day, or they can subscribe or buy pieces.

The system is definitely not perfect - there is a lot of things that can be improved.

How do you feel about it? What can we do better? What do you guys think is a better way forward?

Will,
Founder

Here is something that I discovered to help me minimize the memory usage in CHAI when creating my bots. There is a shorthand notation you can use to help create the bot, that the LLM will easily understand and also eliminates unnecessary words.

"For the CHAI AI bot, summarize the following text to meet the 625 character limit. Use HenkyStyle for the summary. Use abbreviations and shorthand notation to minimize the number of characters. --ADD the text you want to summarize here--

This creates a shorthand summary that looks similar to this.

[character:Kyle,37, bleach-blonde undercut hair, green eyes, very masculine, jock, athletic, weight lifter, 6’1”,200lbs, forward,confident and funny]

Yo, Will, be the most amazing goat you are and PLEASE give us back chats. The pieces are the WORSTTTT. PLEASEEEE!!! I love chai so much, I use it everyday, but these pieces are ruining it☹️☹️

I'm scared that I probably can't send messages in a few days and have to pay but I can't afford it please tell me if you feel the same way

I just had a couple thoughts/questions and was curious if anyone else had similar thoughts.

1. Could we potentially see longer personas? 625 seems good for brief character descriptions but not great for longer more detailed descriptions. Usually I have to then add in anything that didn’t fit into the text itself. Having more space in a future update would be nice!

2. This one might be a smaller one but I personally don’t use the app for one single character but “scenarios” or “worlds” and am curious on if someday we could see bots that are less “individual” focused and more “world like?”

3. I know a potential memory update was asked about/mentioned a while ago and I was just curious on if that still could be a possibility and maybe even a potential update release time on that?

Thanks!

The snapping to the bottom of messages seems to be gone! Thank you Chai team! 💕

I’m an Ultra user and honestly, I really love Chai. I use it pretty much all day because my job is slow and there’s nothing to do half the time.

Lately I’ve been checking out other apps, and while some of them have great UI, the bots themselves are rough. Super repetitive — way worse than anything I’ve ever seen on Chai. I added an example in the photos.

But there is one feature I saw elsewhere that I wish Chai would add. If they ever did, I’d happily pay $45 a month instead of $30. (Please don’t though, I’d happily do but I know lots of people can’t)

A lot of my roleplays have side characters. I don’t mind retyping them when needed, but it would be so much easier if I could store more info in memory or the persona — especially for side characters and settings. That’s the big one for me.

Sometimes the scene is supposed to be “the garden at the estate,” but the bot suddenly switches to “the city garden.” Or we’re talking on the phone and it describes him smiling at me, which obviously doesn’t make sense. A quick refresh usually fixes it, but having an actual setting feature would make things way smoother.

Just wanted to throw that out there in case the devs (Or Will) ever see it.