AI Intrusion: Unveiling the Instagram Bot Breach

0:00A prominent Twitter tech news leaker has recently leaked a screenshot of what they say is Instagram's new AI chat feature. This is pretty interesting. I think that when we're looking at the industry as a whole, we're seeing Snapchat do this, and a lot of other people are planning on integrating these similar tools into social products, and so this isn't far off to think that Instagram is going to be integrating a chat feature. So what it looks like, it says there is a screen says chat with AI, bring your AI to your chats for more fun and engaging experience. It says it can answer questions, give advice.

0:35It says it can choose from different personalities. So it says chat with 30 AI personalities and find which one you like best. It says inspire your creativity, find the best way to express yourself and get help writing messages. And there's another screenshot that essentially just looks like a Instagram chat conversation, except it is obviously AI. So I think this is actually really interesting. And I believe what a lot of people don't know, I think one of the big reasons for pushing forward in this may not actually be Snapchat, but the way that they're currently designing this may be another popular thing that recently came out called Character.ai.

1:09so character.ai is essentially it's an a16z which is one of the biggest venture capital funds in america um backed chatbot startup and when it first launched uh there was an article on tech crunch back in may 30 on may 31st that said um when it launched they had 1.7 million installs in their first week so obviously this thing is incredibly popular and i think that we've seen this kind of demand really rising. Now what character.ai does that I think that Instagram may be copying is Instagram's 30 different characters they're giving you. So Snapchat, right, you really kind of have one character you can talk to.

1:47And I think they're realizing that people may want a lot more diversity than whatever their one prompt is that Snapchat is currently using for their AI. So I think that this is a great idea to do 30 different ones. What I do think is interesting is it would appear that character.ai is using their own AI models. So not necessarily just an API to open AI, which I think is really important. But I also think that that's pretty necessary because they actually raised a whopping$150 million in a Series A funding earlier this year. And that valued their business at over a billion dollars. So I think with that much money raised, it's pretty imperative that they hit something like 1.7 million installs in the first week, this thing has to go viral because there's been a ton of money put into it.

2:32Now, you at the same time, you know, I come from a marketing background. And so when I see a company that has$150 million, and they're getting, you know,$1.7 million on installs, I would assume that that's mainly, you know, they can just run a ton of ads. When asked if they were using some of their money on ads and marketing spend in general, the I mean, I don't know how true it is, but the company claimed that their initial installs and the app launch went without a, you know, specific dedicated marketing budget and 99 % of their downloads were organic, which I think is a pretty bold claim if that is true.

3:07Now that being said, I think since launch, they have lost a little bit of steam. So they were right, they were number three in the top charts back in on like, I guess a week ago. But then a couple days later, they kind of dropped down to number 13 in the charts. So you'll have to go check and see where they're at right now, but I don't know if they were able to like maintain that massive launch boost. However, you know, a couple million people in the first day is quite impressive. And aside from the features of this product, I think that a lot of the interest in this overall is coming from the actual creators from it.

3:43So the creators of Character AI are, their founders are some Palo based team called Noam Shazir and Daniel De Frietas. So these actually were AI experts who led teams of researchers at Google, they actually helped to build their Lambda, large language model, which essentially helps to power conversational AI experiences. So they have a lot of background in this, and they understand this technology. So what's interesting is they said that over at Google, they were pretty frustrated with, you know, Google's hesitancy to roll out different AI chat bots with other researchers in the general public, including through integrations with Google products like Assistant, which in their opinion, they thought would have been the perfect fit.

4:28So this all comes from some reporting of the Wall Street Journal. But essentially, they believe that AI was going to revolutionize search and other areas. And so they ultimately decided to leave Google in late 2021. Despite apparently, you know, allegedly pleas from the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai. But anyways, apparently he asked them to stay continuing their work on the Lambda model. But that same November, they founded Character Technologies, which is now home to Character Eye, which if you think about it is like, you know, they had a lot of vision because this is pre-ChatGPT when there was all this hype.

5:05They just were building this and knew that this was going to be a popular technology. So I think that a lot of these companies that we're seeing explode right now on the scenes are companies that actually were in the works quite a while ago, pre-ChatGPT, many of them, not all. And I think we're going to start seeing that the companies that are becoming possible because of ChatGPT, the really powerful ones, we're going to start seeing end of this year. In any case, I think with this whole thing, the mobile version of their chatbot launched on iOS on May 23rd. So it hasn't been out for very long.

5:38It was also on Google Play. Within the first 48 hours, they had more than 700 ,000 Android installs. So they were, you know, they're beating out like Netflix and Disney Plus and, you know, Prime Video in the entertainment app category. And so I think it'll be interesting to see, you know, it's been apparently popular in Indonesia, the Philippines and Brazil. And also the US is one of their top markets for Android. So I think it was smart launching it on iOS and Android at the same time. I think it's gonna be interesting to follow where this continues to go. I think, you know, ahead of their launch, the app was topping around 200 million visits per month to their web app that they had.

6:18And I think that's kind of what helped spurred the app's popularity is it was already a popular web app. And then they converted that to a regular app, kind of like what chat GPT did with their iOS app, and then that kind of helped push them. So I think one thing that I will say that is very interesting. And this may be why Facebook is looking or a meta is looking at as creating their new Instagram bot. Apparently character.ai claims that users were spending an average of 29 minutes per visit on their platform. And that is a number that they say is 300 times higher than chat GPT. So they're using they're spending 300 times as much time on theirs as they are on chat gpt so in addition um they also said that users quickly become engaged after the first use so they noted that this month once users send their first message to a character um their engagement rate jumps to more than 200 or to more than two hours on average time on the platform um so to date the users on the platform have created over 10 million custom ai characters which i think is kind of part of the i guess part of the power and what's interesting about this platform is i'm sure they launched with a bunch of characters on there already but you can go and create characters right you can write prompts to create a character for what it does um and then other people can use that character so i think that's very interesting um it's also interesting the fact that the team is just under 30 people so it's not a big team um they've recently are they're monetizing this thing by rolling out what's called um c.ai plus which essentially is a lot like chad gpt plus it just has faster response times um during you know peak uh usage and it has early access to new features and all that kind of stuff um and i do think what is interesting is they also announced a strategic partnership with google cloud so they're so you know they literally the founders left google built this thing make a strategic partnership with google cloud i'm sure they have some connections in the company um and they're using that to train their AI models.

8:22Obviously, also, that's the framework they were familiar with as they invented it. So yeah, they're probably not going to go and try to use someone else's, which they're less familiar with. So I think that deal is going to see them using Google Cloud's Tensor processor unit to train and infer LLMs faster and more efficiently. So while some companies like to kind of bulk up their numbers on app downloads, a lot of that we we looked at this, and we had some third-party software look at this and we do believe their numbers are pretty accurate on the 1.7 million installs so it's going to be really interesting to see if they can keep up that hype if they can keep up that demand and how this continues to play out with consumers and consumer apps in the future