Good morning, afternoon, or maybe evening, depending on where you’re at. In today’s digest, I’m covering a new social app from an ex-Snap engineering director that has an AI twist. But first…

The headlines: 

🤖 Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has launched a new AI company.

🎙️ Spotify now lets everyone upload podcasts regardless of if they are hosted.

🍎 Apple is reportedly building a new, cheaper version of the Vision Pro.

Buckle up because we’ve 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. It’s not like we have AI personalities running around social media or anything…

Meet Butterflies. It’s 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 “friends.” 

However, things quickly change once you start using it. Once you sign up, you’ll be asked to create an AI character or, as the app calls it, a “butterfly.” From there, your butterfly will start generating and sharing photos and interacting with other butterfly’s posts. There’s 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 couldn’t shake the uncanny valley feeling. On the surface, it feels like a real, human-led social network, and anyone in passing would probably think you’re 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 that’s the point: As AI gets smarter and more human-like, so too will Butterflies. At the very least, it’s 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 can’t AI do the same? 

FOR PRODUCTIVITY

Document AI by Playmaker saves your team time by automating tedious project-related tasks. It can fetch documents directly from your email, API, or manual upload. From there, it can analyze and extract important information like contacts. 

FOR DEVELOPERS 

Dropbase AI lets developers quickly build custom internal tools and backend operations software without the limitations of existing low-code/no-code builders. Instead, it lets you build them through AI.

FOR MENTAL HEALTH

Sol is a spiritual and mental health app that helps to improve your mindset with daily affirmations and holistic wellness habits to help you build healthier relationships with yourself and others. It’s currently the number one spiritual and mental health app in the US app store.

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