Editor's note: This year we honored some of the brightest young minds in the Bay Area innovation sector as part of our Inno Under 25 feature. Check out all the profiles from this year's honorees here.
It does not seem possible for there to be enough hours in the day to achieve what Peter Chatain has. Over the past few years, he’s launched a promising career as an AI engineer, nearly earned a master’s degree at Stanford and rigorously trained as a rower all the way to the Paris Olympics, where he and his teammates earned a bronze medal in the men’s eight category.
While Chatain took a break from his day job, his employer, Ello, a San Francisco startup that designs software to help children learn to read, supported him through his Olympic journey. It even produced and distributed an e-book about Chatain. After the Olympics, Chatain took a brief break, but is back to work driving forward with his career in AI, while keeping his eye on qualifying for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
What do you do at Ello?
I work on the speech recognition system. Speech recognition obviously works great on adults, as you see with OpenAI and all these other companies, but we have an AI tutor for kids, 4- to 8-year-olds. So there’s a lot of problems with getting that to work. They just have so many different speech patterns.
When did you know you wanted to go to the Olympics?
My freshman year (of college at Stanford), our coach was pretty inspirational. Craig Amerkhanian would always have nicknames to hype people up, and mine was “Big Game James.” (He told me,) “You’ll go trials, you’ll qualify.”
How did you balance work with your job at Ello?
I had done an internship with them in 2022, and afterwards I told them I wanted to come back but I would not be able to do full time. So we worked out a part-time deal, and I’d work 25 hours a week. I worked in person until the end of 2023 and then I was working remotely for all of this year.
It’s time-consuming, but I think I’ve had lots of years of practice. At school, I was dealing with the exact same thing, taking a bunch of classes and then rowing. So I think I just got good at sticking to a calendar and being aware of how much time everything’s going to take.
What was it like staying at the Olympic Village?
We were in the Village from the 22nd of July to the 11th of August, so a long time. We were one of the first teams to get there when it was not fully operational. The U.S. team got us all (air conditioning), which was absolutely amazing. Unless your governing body got your AC, you wouldn’t have it.
How did you think the team did? Were you happy with bronze?
You kind of adjust your expectations based on your results. The previous year, we got sixth place. So based on that, we had no shot at a medal. Then this year, we almost won the World Cup, like a quarter of a second back from the winners. So based on that, we were like, “All right, we’re going for gold.” Immediately post-race, a lot of us were really sad, but then, if you think back to a few months ago, any medal would have been amazing, I think we’re a lot happier upon reflection.
About Peter
Age: 24
Education: Bachelor's in mathematics, Stanford University; just shy of a master's in computer science
Residence: Alameda
Role: Machine learning engineer
Company: Ello
