Two Gen Zers turned down millions from Elon Musk to build an AI based on the human brain-and it's outperformed models from OpenAI and Anthropic | Fortune

"The two had just done something unusual for the moment: they built a small large-language model (LLM) trained not on massive internet data dumps, but on a tiny, carefully chosen set of high-quality conversations. And they taught it to improve itself using reinforcement learning (RL), a technique where a model learns the way a person or animal does: by making decisions, receiving feedback, and then refining behavior through rewards and penalties."

"The two students, William Chen and Guan Wang, called their model OpenChat, and they open-sourced it on a whim. To their shock, OpenChat blew up. "It got very famous," Chen told Fortune. Researchers at Berkeley and Stanford pulled the code, built on top of it, and began citing the work. In academic circles, it became one of the earliest examples of how a small model trained on good data, as opposed to more data, could punch above its weight."

"Musk sent an email through what, at the time, was his new company, xAI, which wanted to recruit the students in a multi-million dollar pay package, Chen says. It was the kind of offer young founders dreamed of. They hesitated. Then, they turned it down."We decided that large-language models have their limitations," Chen said. "We want a new architecture that will overcome the structural limitation of [large-scale machine learning].""

Two 22-year-old friends who met in high school in Michigan were working in Tsinghua University's brain lab in Beijing when they attracted a multimillion-dollar recruitment offer from xAI. They built a small large-language model (LLM) trained on a tiny, carefully chosen set of high-quality conversations and taught it to improve itself using reinforcement learning (RL). They open-sourced the model, named OpenChat, which quickly gained academic attention and adoption at institutions like Berkeley and Stanford. The students declined the xAI offer and chose to abandon OpenChat's immediate momentum to pursue a more ambitious, brain-inspired reasoning architecture.

Read at Fortune