Singapore, 10 June 2026, the Living Brain event hosted by ChatAndBuild in collaboration with OpenAI brought together more than 170 technologists, builders, creators, investors and guests for an evening centered on one defining shift in AI: the move from tools we prompt, to intelligence that can understand context, remember what matters, and grow with us over time.

This is the idea behind the Living Brain, and the vision guiding ChatChat.

Throughout the evening, that vision came to life through two connected threads. The first was technological: how AI is evolving from one-off interactions into more continuous, contextual systems. The second was deeply human: stories of endurance, survival, resilience, and the drive to keep moving forward.

Together, they shaped the central question of the night: not only what AI can do, but what becomes possible for people when intelligence becomes more accessible, more personal, and more able to grow alongside us.

Christel Buchanan: From Tokenmaxxing to Lifemaxxing

Christel Buchanan, Founder and CEO of ChatAndBuild, started with origin of the idea: Context scattered across too many channels and sources, with no single way to bring it together. The realisation that if she was struggling with this, so were millions of people trying to experience AI for the first time. And the conviction that AI agents needed real, personal context to be genuinely useful, not only in work, but in the parts of life that sit outside any productivity lane.

"A lot of AI platforms today are almost obsessed with tokenmaxxing. The objective of our platform is for you to look at lifemaxxing. AI should not be ensuring that you spend more time on AI platforms. It should be helping you take control of your time so that you can invest that extra time into your family, your relationships, your health, your well-being."

Agents are extraordinarily powerful, she explained, but creating them remains far too difficult for most people. Wrapping a large language model in a chat window is not enough. What an agent actually needs is a system around the model: routing, connectors, memory, a tool layer, and the ability to act on its own when something matters.

"We are now in an age where you're moving from models to systems," she said. "ChatChat is basically a place where agents live and work with you."

She demonstrated this live. Her own setup, running on stage, showed roughly twelve agents working in parallel. She walked the audience through what makes the platform different. Proactive event streaming, so an agent can notice when your manager has emailed three times in fifteen minutes and you have not replied. Agent receipts where you can see exactly what your agent accessed and when. Skills scanned for security by both NVIDIA and Cisco. Connectors negotiated directly with the platforms themselves, each one passing through rigorous security review.

Then she revealed the Living Brain itself, the innovation that allows agents to grow with users. Her agent’s Living Brain, she noted, had taken three and a half weeks to populate, and the screen showed a dense web of connections forming across everything she had read, written, and worked on.

The system indexes agent conversations every thirty minutes, converting short-term memory into long-term memory and allowing new connections to form much as they do in a human mind. It will be available as an API and SDK, enabling developers to connect it to other platforms beyond ChatChat.

Before handing over, Christel framed the philosophy underneath the technology, returning to an idea she has shared in her Abundant Intelligence Masterclass.

"We're living in an age of abundant intelligence. AI is not artificial in any way. It's about abundance. And when anyone and everyone can generate anything, context, memory, and your individual taste become so important."

A generic prompt, she argued, gives you a seven out of ten. The distance from there to a nine is not about the model.

"How you get from seven out of ten to nine out of ten is a measure of your perspective and your lived experiences."

OpenAI: Closing the Capability Gap

Indranil Sarkar, who works on the Startups team at OpenAI, supporting founders across APAC, took the stage next to talk about a problem his team thinks about constantly.

OpenAI now ships a frontier model every four to six weeks, he explained. A year ago, that cadence was closer to once a year. The pace of capability is accelerating, but the value people and organisations actually extract from these models is not keeping up. The result is a widening gap.

"We've gone from the world where it's just a chatbot to where AI is actually helping to deliver real work and real outputs," Indranil said. "Harnessing the power of those agents, being able to manage things like memory and context, like what we heard from Christel around the Living Brain, is super critical."

He shared a few figures from OpenAI’s internal research. The boundary between personal and professional use is dissolving. When people describe what they do with AI, the share categorized as “doing,” rather than “asking” or “expressing,” is rising quickly, driven by the growth of agentic workflows. The gap between how frontier firms use AI and how the average company uses it is also growing exponentially.

This, he said, is precisely why OpenAI collaborates with companies like ChatAndBuild.

“We see startups as critical to turning our frontier intelligence into useful everyday products,” he told the room. “It takes a lot to go from a very smart model to building reliable, long-running agents. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. The gap between what models can do and the value people are realizing is increasing. That is a large part of why the work we do with companies like ChatAndBuild is so important.”

Natalie Dau: Are you willing to keep getting braver?

The evening was not just about technology. It led us to something even more essential: our human potential.

Natalie Dau, a two-time Guinness World Record holder and adidas-sponsored endurance athlete, did not come to celebrate her records. She came to talk about failure, hardship, vulnerability, and what happens after you stop talking about resilience and start living it.

She told the story of Project 1000, her run of more than a thousand kilometres across Southeast Asia, and the moment on day one when she failed to reach her target. She had trained harder for this than for anything in her life, and she had failed almost immediately. But this is what she said:

"I chose to move forward, not because it was the easy choice, but because I'd stopped fearing failure and I started using it as fuel."

She described how she shrank the horizon to make the impossible manageable.

"We weren't running a thousand kilometres. We were running one kilometre a thousand times."

And she closed by speaking directly to a room full of people who build the technologies reshaping how we live.

"AI can think faster and remember more than anyone in this room. That's not coming, it's here. But high performance in the age of AI is not about competing with machines. It's about becoming more human, not less. More intentional, more brave, more present."

Her final line left the room in thoughtful silence.

"AI will keep getting smarter, no doubt about it. But the question is, are you willing to keep getting braver?"

Stephen McGown: Your attitude is your reality

If Natalie's story was about choosing to move forward, Stephen McGown's was about surviving when forward motion is taken away entirely.

Stephen, a former investment banker in London with a lifelong dream of riding a motorcycle through Africa, was abducted in Timbuktu in November 2011 and held by Al-Qaeda in the Sahara for five years and eight months. He flew in from South Africa the night before the event, traveling two days to join us.

He spoke about the experience and the practices that kept him intact: Routine, however simple, because a routine is something you can own. Habit, because you become what you do twenty times over. And above all, the words he chose to speak over himself, scratched onto pieces of milk carton he salvaged from a rubbish pit and kept in his top pocket as an imaginary friend who reminded him to be positive, to serve people, to play the long game.

His reflection on the surviving story was the most quietly devastating moment of the night.

"The one thing that was stolen from me during my time in the desert was people. What I would have killed for would be to have somebody with me who was a dear friend, who cared for me, who wanted the best for me, who made me strive for things, who saw things in me, who held me accountable and got me up every day. I think that's priceless."

He left the room with the lesson he carried out of the desert.

"Ultimately, your attitude, only your attitude, is your reality."

Emily Chin: Intention is the difference

Emily Chin, who leads global go-to-market for the Symphony GenAI ecosystem at TikTok, used her remarks to connect the evening’s personal stories to a broader question: what kind of relationship should people build with AI?

"When I was listening to the stories, I got really emotional," she admitted. "It's not about the fact that we're all in this AI space trying to be better than each other, launch after launch, and we forgot what it really means to live."

She asked the room to imagine the year 2050, and described two futures she had generated. One where people are trapped by the machines they created. Another where AI becomes a genuine partner in human creativity. The difference between those two pictures, she argued, comes down to a single word she said she was taking away from the evening: intention.

"AI can do everything, but not all of the things," she said. "The future of AI is not where humans are intimidated by it. It's where they recognise that, and own the relationship up front."

She also shared how TikTok and ChatChat are already integrated. Agents can post directly to TikTok, manage scheduling, and handle the repetitive parts of content creation, freeing people to spend their time where it matters.

“OpenAI pushes the frontier, ChatChat bridges the gap, and TikTok lets people shine.”

The fireside: the next major shift in AI

The evening closed with Christel returning to the stage alongside Sun Weiran, a Solution Architect on the startups team at OpenAI, for a fireside conversation that drew the technical threads of the night together.

Weiran traced the arc of the last three years, from AI as a question-and-answer machine, to AI as a tool for specific problems, to where the field is heading now: AI as a personal assistant that orchestrates across many tools and handles long, multi-step work. ChatChat, he noted, is built precisely for that shift.

Asked about the relationship between models and context, he answered as a data scientist would.

"There's a saying, garbage in, garbage out. Your model is only as good as the context you provide to it. In a modern organisation, your context is distributed and scattered, across meeting transcriptions, emails, Slack, conversation histories. It takes a lot of effort to build a centralised living brain that puts all of that in one place."

He then turned to the role of startups in the AI ecosystem, explaining why OpenAI collaborates with companies like ChatAndBuild rather than building into every vertical itself.

"We provide intelligence, the frontier models. But it's not possible for us to get into every single domain. The only way we can make artificial general intelligence benefit humanity is by partnering with startups like ChatAndBuild, which go deep into their respective areas of expertise."

Christel closed with the line that had quietly framed the entire evening.

"Don't think about tokenmaxxing. Think about lifemaxxing. We built ChatChat for anyone and everyone to be empowered by it, so that they're no longer chained to technology. We actually don't want you to spend that much time on the platform. We want you to go out there and embrace life."

What the room said

The response in the days after carried the same range as the evening itself, from the technical to the deeply human.

Jonathan Chew, an AI Innovation Award winner and LinkedIn AI Top Voice, focused on what ChatChat had actually engineered. He called it one of the best out-of-the-box harness implementations he had seen, pointing to persistent memory that consolidates in the background, agents that watch and trigger rather than simply respond, and audit logs of what every agent touched. His takeaway was pointed: most teams overestimate how custom they need to be, and underestimate what governance actually costs

Kanyakorn Rungrassamee, a Product Marketing Manager at TikTok, described it as one of the most interesting nights she had had in a while. The two unexpected speakers, she noted, made everything that followed land differently. Her summary of the Living Brain was one of the sharpest of the evening: AI that learns from what you have chosen and rejected over time, where memory shapes a standard, not just a moment.

What the evening was really about

Although the event introduced ChatChat and its new capabilities, including the Living Brain, the evening was designed to go beyond a traditional product launch. The evening featured Natalie Dau and Stephen McGown, whose stories brought the launch theme, Human Potential, Thoughtfully Amplified, to life.

Their experiences reinforced the belief behind ChatChat:

AI should not replace human potential, but help more people access, extend, and apply it in meaningful ways.

ChatChat represents a step toward that vision, combining intelligent agent capabilities with memory, context, and continuity to support how people think, create, and work.

With thanks

ChatChat was built in close collaboration with OpenAI, whose support and early access to technology made much of this possible. We are also grateful to Google for their grant and partnership, to Anthropic, for featuring ChatAndBuild as an official customer story, to the NVIDIA Inception program, and to BNB Chain for the collaboration on non-fungible agents.

Our thanks to Indranil Sarkar and Sun Weiran of OpenAI, to Emily Chin of TikTok, and to Natalie Dau and Stephen McGown for sharing stories that will stay with everyone who was in the room.

And to every person who registered, attended, and stayed until the end: thank you for making the launch of ChatChat what it was.

To be among the first to build your own living agents, we are rolling out access to everyone at chatchat.com.

Human Potential, Thoughtfully Amplified: Inside the launch of ChatChat and the Living Brain