Josef Chen

Cooking AI and robots for food at KAIKAKU, acquired by SoftBank-backed REEF. Born and raised in Austria, currently between SF, Boston and London.

Peeled potatoes at my parents’ restaurant since age 6. Then built one of the world’s first bitcoin faucets at age 13 with 150k daily users, which somehow led to leading software in the Austrian military. Eventually the food won.

Research#

Papers on judging physical AI: whether a robot succeeded, when it’s about to fail, and the inference underneath. Epicure, the world’s largest multilingual food model, is the judge for food; the sketch below is a hand-placed miniature. Drag it around. The dashed arcs are pairings the model swears by, like caramel and fish sauce.

fig. 1: a sketch of the flavor space, after arXiv:2605.22391 (5.1m views). the real map lives in the explorer.

All 8 papers

Writing#

Braindumps. The latest three:

All 9 braindumps

Investing#

$5k-100k angel checks into 50+ pre-seed rounds, mostly founders building physical things and/or with some extremely complex: Isembard, Hone, Strala, Dirac, Eridale and friends.

Full portfolio

Taste#

Books worth rereading: Skunk Works (Ben Rich) · Extreme Ownership (Jocko Willink & Leif Babin)

YouTube: Exurb1a (deep science) · saintcavish (Chinese food)

Currently into: motorcycling, tennis, stir fry.