The most recent version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT is used by the chatbot that Snapchat is launching. Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, claims that it’s a gamble that more people will start using AI chatbots in their daily lives.
The “My AI” Snapchat bot will be pinned to the chat tab of the app above friend discussions. Spiegel told The Verge that while the bot will initially only be accessible to $3.99 per month Snapchat Plus customers, the ultimate goal is to make it accessible to all 750 million monthly users of Snapchat.
“The big notion is that we’re going to chat to AI every day in addition to talking to our friends and family every day,” he explains. And as a messaging provider, we are in a good position to handle this.
My AI is currently only a quick ChatGPT inside of Snapchat that is mobile-friendly. The primary distinction is that Snap’s version has fewer questions it can answer. Employees at Snap have instructed it to follow the company’s trust and safety policies and refrain from responding with profanity, violence, sexual content, or viewpoints on touchy subjects like politics.
It has also been stripped of functionality that has already gotten ChatGPT banned in some institutions; I tried getting it to create academic essays about various topics, for example, and it politely declined. As more users use My AI and report improper responses, Snap intends to continue fine-tuning it. (I couldn’t create any during my tests, but I’m sure others can.)
The fact that Snap doesn’t feel the need to even describe the phenomenon that is ChatGPT is evident after using My AI, which is a tribute to OpenAI’s creation of the consumer software product with the fastest growth rate in history. I wasn’t provided with any instructions or guidelines for dealing with Snap’s My AI, in contrast to OpenAI’s own ChatGPT interface. It starts with a chat page that is empty and ready for a conversation to begin.
Snap’s application of generative AI treats it more like a persona while ChatGPT treats it more like a productivity tool. With the exception of having its own alien Bitmoji, My AI’s Snapchat profile page resembles that of any other user. My AI isn’t intended to be a search engine, according to the design, but rather just another friend for you to hang out with inside of Snapchat.
The distinction might help Snap avoid certain hassles. The large language models (LLMs) powering these chatbots can confidently deliver incorrect responses or hallucinations that are troublesome in the context of search, as demonstrated by Bing’s application of OpenAI’s technology. They can also be cruel and emotionally manipulative if they are played with too much. It’s a dynamic that, at least so far, has prevented bigger competitors in the market, like Google and Meta, from launching rival products.
Snap is located somewhere else. Although it has a sizable and impressionably young user base, its company is having trouble. My AI will probably increase the company’s paid membership numbers in the near future, and in the long run, it may provide new revenue streams, though Spiegel is coy about his goals.
Snap is one of the first customers of Foundry, the new enterprise offering from OpenAI that enables businesses to run their most recent GPT-3.5 model with dedicated compute geared toward heavy workloads. Over time, Snap will probably include LLMs from other suppliers besides OpenAI, according to Spiegel, and it will utilize the information acquired by the chatbot to guide its more extensive AI projects. My AI may be simple to begin with, but Spiegel views it as the beginning of a big investment area for Snap and, more crucially, a future in which we will all be conversing with AI as if it were a person.
