Hi, I'm Chappy!

I taught myself to code at 12, got completely hooked, and spent much of my teens cranking out iOS apps. With a lot of tinkering and some incredible luck, one I built in high school became the #1 homework planner in the world and was acquired during college.

That early success led me to my dream job at Apple and put me at the frontier of what technology could do, first in AI/ML R&D and then on the teams building Vision Pro and the earliest prototypes of what became Apple Intelligence. The work was exhilarating. For a while, it felt like the center of the universe.

At the same time, a question from my senior year of college was becoming an obsession. My final paper on GPTs and the technological singularity convinced me that the widening gap between the pace of technology and society's capacity to adapt would be the defining challenge of my lifetime. If ASI could be humanity's final invention, I wanted to dedicate my career to helping us build it wisely and turn its power into broadly shared human flourishing.

When ChatGPT launched, it felt like the timeline had collapsed overnight. I started inviting friends into my living room each week, and that gathering eventually became The AI Collective. Through the community, I met two brilliant Stanford PhDs and left Apple to co-found Cofactory, a venture-backed AI agent startup. For a while, I was building both the company and the community. As AIC grew, it became increasingly clear that this was where I could make the most distinctive contribution, so I eventually chose to focus on it full-time.

Over the next three years, we grew AIC into a global nonprofit with over a quarter-million members and hundreds of chapters around the world. Today I serve as chairman and AIC remains central to my life. An exceptional leadership team now runs the organization day to day, bringing more people into the mission and allowing us to accomplish far more together.

I am now returning to the kind of work that has always energized me most: starting from zero, learning at full speed, and working with exceptional people on a problem that matters. I am searching for the idea and team I want to commit the next decade to, with the ambition to build something at the frontier of AI that can reach enormous scale.

Alongside my own building, I serve on the board of the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund and selectively invest in and advise early-stage founders.

The rest of my life is similarly nerdy. I'm an incurable bookworm and lifelong autodidact, compete in natural bodybuilding (INBF/WNBF), and spend an unreasonable amount of time designing personal systems for how I learn, work, and live. I occasionally write and speak about what I am learning along the way.

If you are working on an important problem, want to build something unusually ambitious, or simply think we would have a fascinating conversation, I would love to hear from you.

Book Notes

323Books

57.3Per Year

7.2dAvg Read

54.5Pages / Day

Weightlifting

2,315Workouts since 2017

48.1KSets

87.7dTraining Time

57.0MLbs lifted

Big three

Estimated 1RM

BenchFlat Barbell Bench Press

500 lbs12 × 354

SquatBack Squats

600 lbs10 × 446

DeadliftConventional Deadlifts

580 lbs9 × 442

Workout history

Last 12 months

Systems

Personal Operating Manual

How I work, think, and collaborate. A guide to understanding what drives me and how to work with me best.

01Personality, Strengths & Blind Spots
02How We Collaborate
03Communication
04Feedback
05Hobbies

Read the full manual

Core Daily Routine

My infamously early morning routine — from a 3:45am wake-up through workout, work, and wind-down by 9:15pm.

01Why So Early?
02Morning
03Evening
04Supplement Stacks
05Caffeine
06Sleep & Recovery

See the full routine

Projects

5,047Contributions in the last year

7,920Since 2015

285Active days

56dLongest streak

Weightlifting App

iOS · on the App Store since 2017

The workout log I have kept on the App Store since 2017 and still use for every session. It tracks sets, estimates one-rep maxes, and turns progress into levels, achievements, and a leaderboard. Every number in the Weightlifting section of this site comes out of it.

Homework App

iOS · acquired by Haystack AI in 2019

Built in high school to keep track of my own assignments. It grew into the #1 homework app on the App Store, with 338k installs and 63k monthly users, and Haystack AI acquired it in 2019.

meta-kb

Open source · 2026

A wiki about LLM agent infrastructure that an LLM compiles from 126 raw sources and then audits against them. Each pass extracts atomic claims, checks every one against its cited source, and rewrites its own prompts from what failed. Three rounds took claim accuracy from 64% to 80%. Fork it and point it at any topic.

This website

Web · open source

The site you are reading, as a public repo. Next.js and tRPC over Postgres, with a three.js room for a homepage. Book notes sync from Notion, training data from Weightlifting App, and the YouTube diet from Takeout exports. Most other sections are JSON files.

Liar's Dice

Web · on this site

A calculator for Liar's Dice. Enter your hand, the dice on the table, and the current bid, and it gives the probability of every possible call so you can decide whether to raise or challenge. The odds are exact. Reading the other players is still on you.

Public Repos

github.com/chappyasel

Musings

Trust in the Age of Acceleration

1 year ago

Holding Society Together When Everything Is Moving Faster Than We Can Understand. How to build and preserve social trust amid AI acceleration and transformative technological change.

The Human Side of AI: 5 Lessons from America’s Top AI Hubs

1 year ago

The heart of AI innovation isn’t found in code — it’s found in conversation. That’s the belief that sparked The AI Collective, which started in early 2023 in a small San Francisco apartment. Today, it has grown into the largest AI community in the United States, with chapters in each of top ten AI hubs: Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC. This year, I had the rare privilege of hosting in-person events in each of these cities, spending up to four days in each exploring their distinct cultures and vibrant AI communities. Unlike typical networking events, Collective gatherings are designed for meaningful connection. Members participate in intimate ten-person discussion groups, where we have lively and insightful conversations about AI’s most pressing topics. Through countless one-on-one and group conversations, I began to see patterns emerge — shared threads and distinct differences. Here are the five key le

The End of Venture Capital

2 years ago

Venture capital as we know it is doomed. If your inner monologue just exclaimed “wow, that’s a bold claim” — you’re right! However, after talking with hundreds of fellow founders, operators, and investors during our weekly AI Collective community events, I have yet to hear a compelling counter to this claim in light of its supporting arguments. To get a better sense of where I’m coming from, let me walk you through the seismic shifts I’m seeing playing out in Silicon Valley right now and what happens after the death of traditional venture capital as we know it.Venture Capital 1.0 Since the inception of software venture capital in the 1980s, investors have been taking the same fundamental gamble: invest in the 1% of companies with the potential to generate 100x+ returns by reaching a $100M+ run rate and $1B+ valuation, paving the way to an exit via initial public offering (IPO) or large scale M&A. Decades later, startups seeking venture funding face the same implicit requirement to tackle a $1

The Apple Way

2 years ago

Four lessons from working on the Apple Vision Pro team. The Apple Vision Pro will define a new paradigm in computing. As an AR/VR engineer working on VisionOS for the past two years and experiencing firsthand the breathtaking magic that is the VisionOS spatial computing platform, I can say this with the utmost confidence. How did we pull this off? What makes Apple so special? How has Apple secured its dominance as the most valuable company, most trusted and admired brand, and most notorious consumer product design house in the world? In my experience working on cross-functional projects with nearly every organization in Apple, there is a particular modus operandi — “the Apple way” — permeating the entire company. Below are four elements of this culture which I believe have been pivotal in elevating Apple to its zenith of innovation and value. Product Ownership The Vision Pro software team has no product managers. Instead, product is a collaborative task shared by the design, enginee

AGI Manifesto Part I: Promise

2 years ago

Source: Midjourney V5 What do Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Mark Zuckerberg all have in common? They are unanimously calling attention to the profound social, cultural, and even cosmic implications foreshadowed by the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). The line between creator and creation is blurring — challenging the very notion of what it means to be human. More existentially, many claim we are living on the precipice of life’s most significant evolution in its 3.7-billion-year history¹. As anyone living in Cerebral Valley will tell you, AI is the new land of opportunity. While Google Research kicked off the gold rush in 2017, it was OpenAI that roused mass awareness when it released ChatGPT to the public last November². Announced merely four months later, its successor, GPT-4, surpasses human performance on a majority of standardized tests and is too powerful for full public release³. With this bl

The AI Collective: A Shared Curiosity

3 years ago

The AI Collective: A Shared Curiosity Is AI conscious? Can public policy keep pace with the rapid developments in AI? How will generative AI transform the creator economy? How can startups working with generative AI develop competitive moats? How do we invest in and capitalize on the generative AI boom? These were just a few of the thought provoking questions discussed at the SF GAI Summit. We are living in an exciting period of accelerating technical progress that is actively reshaping our economic and societal landscapes. We can all feel the tectonic plates shifting under our feet and are trying to predict the future’s tremors. This collective curiosity manifested at the summit as animated conversation between inquisitive minds swirled throughout the room, reminiscent of a modern Homebrew Club — fertile ground for the mushrooming of generative AI’s next great innovations, products, and companies. Discovering Generative AI I distinctly remember the spark of awe and curiosity tha

America’s AI Ultimatum: Forge Ahead or Fall Behind

3 years ago

This week, an open letter signed by over 2,000 AI luminaries called for an immediate six-month moratorium on training giant AI systems. We view the letter as a call to arms rather than a cease fire. As a matter of national interest, America must accelerate AI development to secure its lead in artificial intelligence and develop trustworthy AI systems. By Paul Asel and Chappy Asel Source: Midjourney V5 Sometimes little happens in a decade. Sometimes a decade happens in a month. ChatGPT has taken the world by storm heralding the prospects and perils of generative artificial intelligence to a mass audience for the first time. ChatGPT reached one million users in five days, fifteen times faster than any prior app, and now over 100 million have experienced the weird and wonderous musings of generative AI. The frenetic pace of development accelerated this month as OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT with the release of GPT-4 and ChatGPT Plugins. Google announced Bard, their PaLM API, and integration

Can ChatGPT Generate a Full iOS App?

3 years ago

We already know that ChatGPT has the coding interview skills to land itself a job at a top tech firm. However, job interviews are a notoriously poor predictor of on-the-job performance. So, how would ChatGPT fare performing the day-to-day tasks of a tech worker? Is the software engineering profession under an imminent existential threat? As a mobile app developer, I wanted to understand ChatGPT’s ability to design and program large-scale applications. Can it piece together an entire project and transform mobile app development into an interactive, “choose your own adventure” experience? Can ChatGPT democratize app development — placing this valuable skill in the hands of the average layperson with an original idea? Source: MidjourneyChatGPT Codes an App To evaluate ChatGPT’s app development skills, I decided to guide it through the development of a fully featured “Reddit client” iOS app. RedditGPT should have the ability to load a list of posts from a user-specified subreddit along w

From Nerd to Bodybuilder: Embracing Paradoxical Passions

3 years ago

How does a shy nerd boy from high school find himself flexing on stage in front of hundreds of spectators donning little more than a G-string? Spray tanned and shaved from head to toe, I strode in front of the blinding spotlights as my name bellowed out over the PA system. Preparing to perform my solo posing routine, I masked first time jitters with a composed facade after hearing judges could sense fear like sharks smell blood in the water. Performing at a bodybuilding competition almost naked in front of a mass of ogling strangers was the culmination of a five-year journey. Once terrified at the mere thought of presenting a powerpoint in front of a small class, it hit me: how did I get here? I have been enthralled by computers and programming for as long as I can remember. Spending entire weekends squirreled away in my room, I taught myself how to write iOS applications, tinkered with Arduinos and bread board circuits, built custom computers, and reverse engineered electronic toys.

Featured Talks

Consensus 2026 · MiamiMay 2026

Why AI Agents May Be Crypto's First Real Users

AI agents are starting to make decisions, use tools, and act on behalf of people and businesses. So what happens when they need to transact?

24 minWatch

Humans in AI Week · SFJun 2026

What Really Is The AI Collective?

The story behind the Collective — from a San Francisco living room meetup to a global community — and the trust gap opening up between how fast technology moves and how fast people adapt.

20 minWatch

tjSTAR SymposiumMay 2025

Principles for Living in the Age of Acceleration

The keynote at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology — on thriving in a world of accelerating change, and what holds steady as AI reshapes everything.

31 minWatch

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
~ Winston Churchill

“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”
~ Winston Churchill (whoops, twice haha)

“The more voluntary suffering you build into your life, the less involuntary suffering will affect your life.”
~ Tim Ferriss

Book Notes