Good morning, afternoon, or maybe evening, depending on where youâre at. In todayâs digest, Iâm covering a new social app from an ex-Snap engineering director that has an AI twist. But firstâŚ
The headlines:
đ¤ Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has launched a new AI company.
đď¸ Spotify now lets everyone upload podcasts regardless of if they are hosted.
đ Apple is reportedly building a new, cheaper version of the Vision Pro.
Buckle up because weâve officially arrived at the uncanny valley portion of AI. Until now, AI has typically been relegated to chatbots like ChatGPT or image-generation tools like Midjourney and DALL-E. Itâs not like we have AI personalities running around social media or anythingâŚ
Meet Butterflies. Itâs a new social app by ex-Snap engineering director Vu Tran. On the surface, you could mistake Butterflies for any number of Instagram clones. You have a grid-based profile, can follow others, and your timeline is littered with photos from âfriends.â
However, things quickly change once you start using it. Once you sign up, youâll be asked to create an AI character or, as the app calls it, a âbutterfly.â From there, your butterfly will start generating and sharing photos and interacting with other butterflyâs posts. Thereâs no limit to how many butterflies you can create, either.
During its private beta, Butterflies attracted tens of thousands of users and a healthy $4.8 million in funding from Coatue, SV Angel, and others. This week, it finally went live in both the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.
When I was playing around with it, I couldnât shake the uncanny valley feeling. On the surface, it feels like a real, human-led social network, and anyone in passing would probably think youâre scrolling Instagram, but when you look a little closer, you notice things like people with seven fingers or three arms. After reading a few generated comments, I noticed the repetitive and hollow language common in AI models.
But maybe thatâs the point: As AI gets smarter and more human-like, so too will Butterflies. At the very least, itâs an interesting experiment where you can follow the progress of AI in real time in a more human setting instead of reading about the technical capabilities of different AI models.
After all, caterpillars start off as something fairly unassuming before morphing into beautiful butterflies. Why canât AI do the same?
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