Snapchat has a new AI chatbot. They are, in hindsight, the perfect company to experiment with personality-driven chat. They have a younger user base, less fear of upsetting a stodgy corporate audience, and a history of being an early adopter to strange new technologies.
Today we’re launching My AI, a new chatbot running the latest version of OpenAI’s GPT technology that we’ve customized for Snapchat. My AI is available as an experimental feature for Snapchat+ subscribers, rolling out this week.
At launch, My AI is essentially just a fast mobile-friendly version of ChatGPT inside Snapchat. The main difference is that Snap’s version is more restricted in what it can answer. Snap’s employees have trained it to adhere to the company’s trust and safety guidelines and not give responses that include swearing, violence, sexually explicit content, or opinions about dicey topics like politics.
It has also been stripped of functionality that has already gotten ChatGPT banned in some schools; I tried getting it to write academic essays about various topics, for example, and it politely declined.
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While ChatGPT has quickly become a productivity tool, Snap’s implementation treats generative AI more like a persona… My AI is meant to be another friend inside of Snapchat for you to hang out with, not a search engine.
Also, I am not sure I fully appreciated the fact that OpenAI not only incited a gold rush with the release of ChatGPT but they also positioned themselves to be the premier shovel seller.
Snap is one of the first clients of OpenAI’s new enterprise tier called Foundry, which lets companies run its latest GPT-3.5 model with dedicated compute designed for large workloads.