Ep. 56: Grace Li, Design Arena Co-Creator and Arcada Labs Co-Founder

Grace Li is the co-founder of Arcada Labs (arcada.dev), creators of Design Arena, Prediction Arena, and Social Arena. Arcada's vision is to build portals that bridge AI to the real world by building real-world evaluations for things that are often hard to benchmark, like design, ability to make money in prediction markets, and ability to write posts that do well on social media. Before starting Arcada, Grace studied CS at Harvard and spent some time at Apple.Delta Institute (deltainstitutes.org) supports exceptional researchers and engineers, from academia to industry and beyond. They host technical events to bring great people together, a podcast that gives industry/academic leaders a platform to share their experiences, a small fellows program that builds a tight-knit community of exceptional people, and a grant program that provides compute/mentorship for research projects.Timestamps:00:00 Introduction00:53 Founder's Background and Journey01:45 Startup Path and Early Experiences03:53 Pivoting to Game Engine Development06:03 Scaling and Expanding Arenas09:53 Building and Measuring Model Capabilities13:14 Agent Runner and Open Source Contributions14:33 Future Vision and Customer Focus18:56 Evaluating Next JS Models: Static vs. Live Benchmarks20:20 Challenges of Crowdsourced Benchmarks21:28 Understanding User and Researcher Needs23:23 Introduction to Prediction Arena24:30 Technical Implementation and Investor Skepticism26:45 Model Performance and Future Improvements31:28 Exploring Social Arena36:08 Company Culture and Future Goals37:54 Conclusion and Final Thoughts