How Does Snapchat AI Work?

What to know

Snapchat’s MyAI is powered by OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 large language model.
Snapchat is one of the first clients of OpenAI’s enterprise offering – Foundry – which provides dedicated compute power to run its AI model.
Snapchat’s My AI is essentially the free version of ChatGPT with its own set of capabilities and limitations that come from being tied to a social media platform.

It’s the season of artificial intelligence, and everyone’s buying into the game. From Microsoft to Google, everyone wants a piece of the AI pie and Snapchat is one of the recent players to join the growing list of companies integrating AI into their platforms to one-up the competition. Its ‘My AI’ chatbot offering is the result of just such an endeavor. But how does Snapchat’s AI exactly work? Let’s find out.

Related: How to Turn On Snapchat My AI

What is Snapchat’s My AI?

My AI is Snapchat’s version of a GPT-powered chatbot, bringing all the capabilities of generative AI to its social media platform. As one would expect from generative AI, it can be used to strike up general conversations over topics of varied kinds.

Snapchatters can get it to write poems on the fly, suggest AR filters for snaps, gifts to purchase, restaurants to visit, and a whole lot more.

Once My AI is available to you on Snapchat, you will see it added to your list of friends and will sit at the very top of the ‘Chat’ screen for easy access.

You can talk to it like any other friend on your list, customize its name and avatar, send it snaps, add it to group chats, and do just about everything that you can with generative AI tools like ChatGPT.

You can unpin My AI from your Chat screen if it’s not to your liking, or clear it from your chat feed. But it will continue to remain on your list of friends, even with a Snapchat+ subscription.

Snapchat hopes My AI will be the personal AI assistant that you can turn to on a regular basis. Going forward, it appears that users will have to make space for the My AI chatbot on Snapchat, whether they like it or not.

How does Snapchat My AI work?

To understand how Snapchat’s My AI works, we’ll need to dive into the language models and architectures that it is based on.

Built on GPT architecture

Snapchat’s My AI is built off of OpenAI’s GPT technology. So, it is going to be very similar to ChatGPT. Being a client of OpenAI has allowed Snapchat (and others) to bring generative AI capabilities to its platform by essentially leveraging the power of the GPT LLM and the copious amounts of data that it’s been trained on.

Snapchat is one of the first to use OpenAI’s GPT architectural model as part of the latter’s Foundry developer platform. This lets Snapchat use dedicated computational resources for its AI models so users can get quick, snappy responses from the My AI chatbot. Though the exact GPT version that Snapchat uses hasn’t been disclosed, the underlying architecture is likely a modified version of GPT 3.5.

What can Snapchat AI do?

Thanks to the aforementioned language model and GPT architecture, My AI can generate human-like messages and converse in natural languages. But being on Snapchat, it has a few social media tricks up its sleeve.

My AI can recommend you AR filters and lenses to spruce up your snaps…

… provide recommendations for places to eat or things to do, play games with you, or just hang out and have a laugh. It can also be brought into your conversations with friends with the @myai command in group chats to answer your questions.

Moreover, Snapchat is looking to add the ability for My AI to snap you back with completely AI-generated images which will make for some fun conversations with AI whenever it’s made available.

Sure, it can sometimes be a little biased in its responses and may hallucinate about factual information from time to time. But that isn’t news to anyone who’s ever used such generative AI tools before. ChatGPT still is grappling with that issue and people still use it anyway.

Snapchat AI shortcomings

Given all its GPT-powered prowess, Snapchat’s My AI isn’t all like ChatGPT. It can’t write essays for you or help you with your math homework, or code. It also isn’t connected to the web like Microsoft Bing or Google Bard and can’t serve as your daily news update either.

Snappers should see My AI as the free version of ChatGPT with its own set of capabilities and limitations that come from being tied to a social media platform.

Related: How to Break Snapchat AI

FAQ

Let’s take a look at a few commonly asked queries about Snapchat’s My AI chatbot.

How is AI used in Snapchat?

Snapchat’s My AI uses generative artificial intelligence models built by OpenAI. It is designed to serve you as a personal assistant with AI capabilities that can do just about everything that chatbots built on GPT architectures can do.

Is Snapchat AI free?

Yes, Snapchat’s My AI comes free with the latest update.

Is My AI on Snapchat safe?

Depending on who you ask, you may get a slightly different answer about Snapchat’s My AI’s safety. Some users have reported concern over its ability to access your location without permission, while many believe its content moderation is broken and might generate harmful responses. However, as My AI continues to develop, users can expect Snap to redress these issues.

Snapchat is one of the first OpenAI clients to use ChatGPT-like language models and dedicated compute as part of the latter’s Foundry developer platform. My AI’s capabilities and the speed with which it responds are a direct result of that. With reliability and moderation being bettered over time, users may come to eventually use My AI as Snapchat intends.

We hope this guide helped you understand how Snapchat’s My AI works behind the scenes and what you can do with it. Until next time! Keep snapping.

Related: 2 Ways to Turn Off Snapchat AI