ChatGPT Integration: Snapchat's Next Big Move in Messaging Evolution

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0:40So let's jump into it. So this all comes on a few news articles, but one particular from The Verge is called Snapchat is releasing its own AI chat bot powered by ChatGPT. So it's going to be called the My AI bot, and it's initially only going to be available to paying Snapchat plus subscribers. So the CEO of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, says that it's the company's beginning and it's just the beginning for their generative AI plans. So this is obviously something they've thought a lot about and something they're planning on integrating a lot more. So it's going to be pretty interesting considering this is one of the first times that one of these major social media networks has integrated something into their app that is so integrated.

1:25And it's also been built on OpenAI, which is pretty interesting. They don't have their own AI chatbot play like Google or Microsoft or some of these other big players have. So according to the CEO, it's a bet that AI chatbots are going to become increasingly more a part of our everyday life. And it's interesting because this is only available for their premium users that are paying$3.99 a month. But they say that the goal is eventually to just make this available to all of their 750 million monthly users. so this is interesting because I feel like if they really are able to scale this up to that amount of users it's going to be interesting for open AI as they're instantly you know assuming people use this tool and it's good enough are going to see a massive spike in their usage and of course this is a big win for them for Microsoft who's doing all the computational stuff on the back end and is going to be making money off of this this is a big win for companies like NVIDIA that are, you know, doing making hardware for a lot of this processing that goes down.

2:27So it's kind of interesting to see, you know, down the pipe who is benefiting from all this. But, you know, at the end of the day, the CEO, he says that the big idea is that in addition to talking to our friends and family every day, we're going to talk to AI every day. And this is something we're well positioned to do as a messaging service. This is so interesting. You know, he's really betting on the fact that in addition to, you know, just talking to our friends, we're going to want to sit there and chat with an AI and like I totally understand sitting there and talking to chat GPT when you're trying to figure out you know the answers to a question or whatnot and kind of using it like you would Google but using it as just a chat bot to pass the time or to talk is a very interesting of course like people have been doing it there's chat bots like Replica that are really popular with teenagers but this gets really interesting to see how this plays and I'm assuming that for Snapchat, they're probably trying to take a little market share from Replica, who's incredibly popular, one of the top apps.

3:29So at launch, it's essentially just a fast, mobile-friendly version of ChatGPT inside of Snapchat, nothing too crazy out of the box. So the main difference is that Snap's version is more restricted in what it can answer. So Snap's employees have tried training it to adhere to the company's trust and safety guidelines and not give responses that includes swearing, violence, sexually explicit content, or opinions about dicey topics like politics. And it's kind of interesting because ChatGPT, they kind of have their own trust and safety layer where they're trying to filter for a lot of these things.

4:01But I'm just assuming that Snapchat is putting an extra filter on there considering their audience does have a lot of younger people in it. So essentially it's been stripped of functionalities that have already gotten chat GPT banned in some schools. You know, someone tried to get it to write an academic essay about a bunch of topics and it politely declined. So it's interesting because Snap plans to keep tuning their whole AI tool as more people use it and, you know, report inappropriate answers. But, you know, one tester went in and he was testing it out and he was not able to get it to say anything that, you know, wasn't too standard or crazy.

4:41So I think, you know, after trying it, a lot of people have been saying that it feels that Snapchat doesn't feel the need to even explain this phenomenon of ChatGPT, but they pretty much can just plug it straight in and assume that it's going to be a tool that people are using. And it's kind of interesting, especially considering the fact that ChatGPT doesn't really have an official app available to the public yet. I know they have some beta versions going around. I've heard some venture capitalists and investors saying that they got early access. but this is going to be you know one of the big moments of ChatGPT being directly integrated into a consumer app and so maybe just for that fact it will help Snapchat's downloads if someone just wants to use ChatGPT on their phone and this is an easy way to do it.

5:25So I think that you know while this has become a productivity tool for a lot of people I think Snapchat's implementations really just treats it more like a persona so it's more just like it's something for people to use and talk to and not necessarily so much of the productivity of like getting it to write a paper or answering important questions like you would a search engine or something else like that. So I think that the that distinction might save Snap some of the headaches that you know we see Bing and Google seen as you know ChatGPT can definitely be not perfectly accurate all the time it can say some crazy things um you know the the bing chat bot has said some crazy things and google famously had inaccurate data in their product launch so i think snapchat's gonna avoid some of those things because they're not really setting this thing up to be like some you know uh engine that gives you truth it's more just something to chat with or talk with or pass time on so i think that uh that should save them it's gonna be interesting to see if this is able to help them increase their company's uh paid subscriber numbers in the short term um and maybe eventually this could open up some new ways for snapchat to make money so it'll be interesting to follow that as it goes i think snapchat is one of the first clients of open ai's new enterprise tier which is called foundry um and essentially it lets companies run the latest gpt 3.5 which is chat gpt model um with a dedicated compute designated for large workloads right so it's not going to have these timeouts these errors these crashes being down um like the rest of us you know, regular people using ChatGPT.

7:04It's got kind of more of a upgraded enterprise level. So the CEO of Snapchat says that it's likely that they're going to incorporate more LLMs, large language models from other vendors besides OpenAI over time, and that it's going to use the data gathered from the chatbot to inform its broader AI efforts. So what that means, because that is incredibly important, it's going to use the data gathered from OpenAI, ChatGPT, to inform its broader AI efforts, aka they are going to be using the chats that people are having to train more AI models. This is something I've secretly been telling people to do for, this is a concept I've been talking about for a while.

7:45I haven't been telling anyone to do anything or not do anything. Definitely not investment advice or business advice, but one could make the argument that you could use ChatGPT and the conversations that perhaps you have, like if you integrate it into your product and have your users using it, you could use that content to store it and train your own AI models to produce that type of content and thereby you would not need necessarily opening. I don't know if that's in the terms of service or not just putting that out there that's definitely something you could do and it looks like that's in one way or another something that Snapchat is going to do harnessing this data so I think while it's pretty basic to start it's just the beginning of what they see as a really major investment area for Snapchat, and more importantly, a future where I think they're really just hoping that people are going to start talking to AI like it's a person.

8:34It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, and thanks for joining us for the show today.