[State of Evals] LMArena's $1.7B Vision — Anastasios Angelopoulos, LMArena
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So Light and space, the trunatophone. Right up. Alright, we're here with Anastasios from Arena. I actually don't actually know your Star7A is like very Angelopoulos. Yeah. Yeah, very good. Um congrats on all the success. You got the arena handle. Yeah,
we did. We got the arena handle. Thank you. Big branding moment.
Uh I mean I I think X is like being more commercial, so obviously you bought it, but like I at least you like have a place to go to where you can be like, Hey, like we really like this. But I do think like dropping LM Yeah has changed the the the this the feel of it. I don't understand how you feel. Yeah.
I don't know. I mean the reason we kept the LM at the beginning is because we were like we started as LMSis, right? Out of the LMSIS sort of c you know, uh conglomerate at Berkeley. So we decided language models, yeah. Exactly. So so we wanted to maybe broaden a little bit. Yeah. And and we were the first arena, so we feel like let's kinda try to
own that. Yeah. Last time you we had you guys on, you hadn't really spun out yet and we I did a call with Alessio and I was like, These guys are gonna start a company. And I didn't know I think you actually were already started at the time. I don't I don't remember. Uh maybe. Because Anj I had a I I chatted with Anj and he said he was your founding CEO. He was, indeed. Uh which I people don't know. Yeah. Anj is a very interesting character. We we have a podcast schedule with him. Yeah, yeah.
How did LMArena evolve from a Berkeley basement project to a $1.7 B valuation?
He does a lot more than normal VCs. He does. He's been incredible to us. You you wanna shout out some stuff that you did?
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the way the company started was as an incubation by Anj.
Yeah.
So what he did is he kinda like found us at Berkeley and picked us out of the basement and was like, Hey, these guys seem like they're on to something and started working with us really early, gave us you know, gave us some grants. He was not, you know, A sixteen was not the only one to do this. We also had a great grant from Sequoia, but um Ans was in particular quite quite supportive of us and you know, gave us some resources in order to continue building out arena before we even were committed to s starting a business. And in that capacity, he sort of like, you know, formed an entity for us and this and that. And, you know, he was like, hey, you guys can walk away at any time if you guys don't want to start a business.
I mean, it was really incredible. Very aggressive investment move by him. Right, because uh of course any money that he spent at the end of the day, like we could walk away and give it leave him with nothing. But I think he knew wisely that the right thing for Arena was to start a company out of it. It was the only way that we could scale and that, you know, Weylin Yon and I would would ultimately see that and be excited about doing it ourselves, which is which w which ended up being the case.
Was there a moment for you where you were uh I'm sure you were debating it yourself. You had other opportunities. What was the deciding factor for you? It became clear that
The only way to scale What we were building was to build a company out of it. That the world really needed something like Arena. Arena being really a place to sort of measure, understand, and and advance the frontier AI capabilities in on real-world users, on real-world usage, based on organic feedback. And that in order to achieve the the scale and you know distribution necessary. And the quality, of course, of the platform necessary to to do this effectively, we would need to start a company out of it. You know, we considered other options. Are we gonna keep doing this an academic project? Are we gonna do it as a nonprofit, blah, blah, blah? But ultimately, uh under those c constructs, we didn't feel like we'd have the resources necessary to accomplish our mission.
So you raised a hundred million or eight eighty, hundred. Hundred. A hundred million dollars. That's a lot of resources. It's great. What yeah, what's it for? Well, you know, obviously. I speak on behalf of like everywhere who
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:31
2
How did LMArena evolve from a Berkeley basement project to a $1.7 B valuation?
1:31–3:51
3
Why did the founders decide to spin out of academia and become a company?
3:51–5:30
4
What are the main uses of the $100 M Series A funding (inference, React migration, hiring)?
5:30–6:15
5
How many users and conversations does LMArena host, and who are its core demographics?
6:15–12:34
6
What was the “Leaderboard Delusion” controversy and how did LMArena refute the claims?
12:34–13:25
7
What is the “Nano Banana” moment and how did it impact Google’s market share?
13:25–19:08
8
What core principles keep the public leaderboard a charity and ensure platform integrity?
19:08–23:48
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