# @forbes on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DNLSy62u0VW
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/33200693-forbes-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/e03117c1a0.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-08-10T13:38:47.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Forbes (@Forbes) — https://gondola.cc/Forbes

## Caption

Berkeley Professor Ion Stoica and his students don’t like being one-upped by anyone, let alone by archnemesis Stanford. That’s why, when a user asked for a way to compare their open-source chatbot Vicuna with the rival school’s Alpaca model, the #Berkeley team pitted the bots against each other in a bloody #AI battle.

The user community went wild. Soon, Stoica’s group added the ability to test random models side by side and let people vote on the battle outcome. It was all in good fun, explains associate professor Joseph Gonzalez, who worked on the project along with Stoica and his students We-Lin Chiang and Anastasios N. Angelopoulos.

Out of that fun came ChatBot Arena, a website that hosts over 400 AI models, allowing users to chat with multiple ones simultaneously. Rebranded as #LMArena in April, with Stoica serving as chairman, Chiang as CTO and Angelopoulos as CEO, the company has raised $100 million in VC funding at a $600 million valuation. The 2-year-old outfit is already being used by developers like OpenAI, xAI and Google to test their chatbots, and has garnered over 3.5 million votes from users wanting to weigh in on these evolving models.

This is just the latest research initiative from Computer Science Professor Ion Stoica’s lab to make an industry splash. Read more at the link in our bio. (Photo: Timothy Archibald for Forbes)

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## Tags

berkeley, lmarena, ai

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