Chen Kaijie is a serial entrepreneur who left Duke University before graduating. He previously built MidReal, an artificial intelligence-powered interactive storytelling platform, and launched Macaron, a personal agent app that topped Product Hunt’s daily rankings on its first day. 36Kr spoke with him to learn more about Macaron and Mind Lab, the company behind it.
Mind Lab was founded in October 2025 and has more than 30 employees. Its founder, Andrew Chen, co-authored the FireAct paper with Shunyu Yao. The company’s team largely comes from xAI, DeepMind, DeepSeek, ByteDance Seed, MIT, Tsinghua University, and other companies and academic institutions.
Mind Lab’s direction closely aligns with the continual learning approach championed by Richard Sutton, a Turing Award winner widely regarded as the father of reinforcement learning, and Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO.
At the main forum on the opening day of this year’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Sutton said the central path for the next generation of AI would be driven by experience, while the static, labeled-data paradigm had reached its ceiling.
DeepSeek has also brought continual learning to a wider audience. It has said continual learning is the problem the industry needs to solve after agents, and that it is a capability the next generation of models must possess.
