# Josef Chen

> Cooking foundational AI and robots for food at [KAIKAKU](https://kaikaku.ai). Born and raised in Austria, currently in London. Research on food ingredient embeddings, physical AI, and LLM ensembles; angel investor in 50+ pre-seed rounds.

Elsewhere: [X](https://x.com/josefchen) · [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/josef-chen/) · [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/josefchen)

## Research

- [When Does Combining Language Models Help? A Co-Failure Ceiling on Routing, Voting, and Mixture-of-Agents Across 67 Frontier Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27288) (Jun 2026): Combining LLMs rarely beats the single best model. A co-failure ceiling, measured across 67 frontier models.
- [Memory as a Wasting Asset: Pricing Flash Endurance for Embodied Agents, and the Limits of Doing So](https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18144) (Jun 2026): Robot flash memory as depreciating capital, with a shadow price on every write.
- [AEGIS: A Backup Reflex for Physical AI](https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06660) (Jun 2026): Detecting imminent manipulation failure from a weak policy's internal states, then switching to a stronger one just in time.
- [AURA: Action-Gated Memory for Robot Policies at Constant VRAM](https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02775) (Jun 2026): Write to memory only when it would change the next action.
- [Memory-Bound but Not Bandwidth-Limited: The Physical AI Inference Gap in Batch-1 LLM Decode](https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30571) (May 2026): Why faster GPUs disappoint at batch-1: launch overhead, not bandwidth.
- [Epicure: Navigating the Emergent Geometry of Food Ingredient Embeddings](https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22391) (May 2026): Ingredient embeddings trained on 4.14M recipes, from chemistry to recipe context. — [explorer](https://huggingface.co/spaces/Kaikaku/epicure-explorer)
- [Epicure: Multidimensional Flavor Structure in Food Ingredient Embeddings](https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22776) (Apr 2026): Fifteen independent dimensions of taste, texture, geography and culture, recovered from embedding space. — [explorer](https://huggingface.co/spaces/Kaikaku/epicure-explorer)

## Writing

- [Turks All the Way Down](https://josef.cn/blog/turks-all-the-way-down) (Jul 7, 2026): The most successful machine of the eighteenth century was a cabinet with a person inside. Much of the AI stack still is.
- [The Genghis Khan Operating System](https://josef.cn/blog/ghenghis) (May 29, 2026): Foxconn and TSMC are running an 800-year-old operating system. It conquered the world once. Here is how the West takes it back.
- [Cathedrals and Europe's Case for Forward Deployed Engineering](https://josef.cn/blog/cathedrals) (Feb 25, 2026): Europe's best companies don't scale by removing humans from the loop. They scale by putting engineers back on the factory floor.
- [Breaking Europe's Perfectionism Addiction](https://josef.cn/blog/perfectionism) (Aug 25, 2025): Europe trains perfect planners, Silicon Valley ships imperfect winners
- [Alone Together: Disconnection Is Our Generation's Black Death](https://josef.cn/blog/black-death) (May 11, 2025): The Black Death killed 100 million people in the 14th century, and it's happening again. Just like back then, none of us seem to know why.
- [Fixing Europe's broken patent system](https://josef.cn/blog/europe-patent-reform) (Feb 9, 2025): How to Fight Innovation's Silent Killer | High costs, no flexibility, and lost ideas. Here's how simple reforms can fix it.
- [How breaking invisible family pacts forge unstoppable founders.](https://josef.cn/blog/invisible-pact) (Oct 6, 2024): Why founders who defy family expectations become the most relentless ones
- [UK's elite hardware talent is being wasted](https://josef.cn/blog/uk-talent) (Aug 3, 2024): Imperial, Oxford, and Cambridge produce world-class engineers. Yet post-graduation, their trajectory is an economic tragedy - and a hidden arbitrage opportunity.

## Investing

$5k-100k angel checks into 50+ pre-seed rounds, mostly founders building physical things. Usually the first or weirdest check on the cap table. Full portfolio: [https://josef.cn/investing](https://josef.cn/investing)

## Feeds

- [RSS](https://josef.cn/feed.xml): full-content feed of the essays