Josef Chen

Cooking foundational AI and robots for food at KAIKAKU. Born and raised in Austria, currently in 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 food embeddings, physical AI, and when combining language models actually helps. The Epicure work trained ingredient embeddings on 4.14 million recipes; the sketch below is a hand-placed miniature of that map. Drag it around. The dashed arcs are pairings the model swears by, like caramel and fish sauce.

+ 4 more papers− fewer papers

Writing

Braindumps. The latest three:

All 7 braindumps →

Investing

$5k-100k angel checks into 50+ pre-seed rounds, mostly founders building physical things: Isembard, Dirac, Minerva, and friends. Usually the first or weirdest check on the cap table.

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: youtube documentaries, vertical integration, stir frying.