About the role
from listingOur mission: break the avatar Turing TestAlan Turing proposed the Turing Test in 1950 as a benchmark for intelligence: a chat conversation where you couldn't tell if a human or AI was responding to you on the other side.ChatGPT broke this original, text-based Turing Test.ElevenLabs is close to breaking the voice Turing Test: AI that is indistinguishable from a human on a phone call.We will break the avatar Turing Test: digital humans that are indistinguishable from a real human on a video call.But, beyond just photorealistic humans, our ambitions are to bring all characters to life — from a photorealistic human to a cartoon turtle.
We are building digital characters that you connect with.As featured inWe're an AI research lab that built the world's first Character World ModelWhat is a Character World Model? A video world model is a new type of foundational AI model that generates video that is interactive, persistent, real-time, and physically accurate. For example, a playable videogame where every frame is generated in real-time by a diffusion model in response to the player's button clicks rather than pre-programmed within a 3D game engine.LemonSlice trains video world models that can simulate the world, but are heavily optimized for interactive conversation.
This is called a Character World Model: expressive, digital characters that talk, listen, and react in real-time.LemonSlice released the world's first Character World Model in April 2025 with LemonSlice-1. Our latest model — LemonSlice-2.1 — is a 20B end-to-end diffusion transformer video model that renders every pixel at 20fps on a single GPU.In contrast to deep-fake or generative approaches to avatars, Character World Models enable any type of character, hand-object interactions, movement within physical spaces, moving backgrounds, and more.
It is the Bitter Lesson approach and the only way to ultimately break the avatar Turing test.Backed by the bestWe raised a $10.5M seed round from Silicon Valley's leading investors: Matrix, Y Combinator, Emmett Shear (Cofounder/CEO, Twitch), Arash Ferdowsi (Cofounder/CTO, Dropbox), The Chainsmokers (Mantis VC)Build the future of human-AI interaction with us.Research Scientist, Video DiffusionSan Francisco · Research · Full Time→Research Scientist, Real-Time InteractivitySan Francisco · Research · Full Time→Research Scientist, World ModelSan Francisco · Research · Full Time→Research Scientist / Engineer — Data and Training InfrastructureSan Francisco · Research · Full Time→Software Engineer, AI Kernel OptimizationSan Francisco · Engineering · Full Time→Software Engineer, InferenceSan Francisco · Engineering · Full Time→Don't see your role?
Send us an email with your resume founders@lemonslice.com