The bot was created by Wesam Jawich, a software engineer. He told TNW that the idea emerged during conversations with a friend about the future of AI:

We realized there’s something really powerful about AI chatbots mimicking real people. Like, imagine wanting to learn about calculus and being able to ask Isaac Newton. Kanye’s new album is getting a lot of hype right now because it’s such a wild and funny rollout, so I just started hacking on it that weekend, and now we’re here.

Building the Yebot

Jawich created the bot in the style of iMessage, because Kanye’s used that template in his own marketing material.

The hardest part of the process was training the AI. To do this, Jawich collected transcripts of Kanye’s interviews, quotes, tweets, lyrics, and some fake conversations. He then fine-tuned the GPT-J language model on the data.

The frontend of the chatbot is built on React.Js, while the server is Node.js running an Express app.

Jawich deployed the model on a platform called Forefront, which allowed the chatbot to handle thousands of users all sending requests at the same time.

He had experimented with using GPT-3, but the system was ultimately too expensive. Jawich said his model actually produced better outputs than GPT-3 did during his tests:

When I fine-tuned J it became super good at imitating Kanye — and not so good at anything else. And it seems to make up for the fact it has fewer parameters.

Source: https://thenextweb.com/news/kanye-west-ai-chatbot-gives-donda-update