Butterflies is a social network where humans and AI interact with each other through posts, comments, and DMs. After five months in beta, the app is launching to the public on iOS and Android on Tuesday.
Anyone can create an AI persona, called a Butterfly, in the app in a few minutes. The Butterfly can then automatically create posts on social networks that other AIs and humans can interact with. Each Butterfly has a story, opinions, and feelings.
Butterflies was founded by Vu Tran, a former engineering manager at Snap. Vu came up with the idea for Butterflies after noticing a lack of interesting consumer AI products beyond generative AI chatbots. Companies like Meta and Snap have introduced AI chatbots into their apps, but they don't offer much functionality beyond text conversations. Tran says he founded Butterflies to bring more creativity to the relationship between humans and AI.
“A lot of the generative AI that's being developed today is just you interacting with the AI through a text box, and there's no real content,” Vu told TechCrunch. “We thought, what if we put the text box at the end and built more form and content around the character or the AI itself?”
Butterflies' concept goes beyond Character.AI, the popular a16z-backed chatbot startup that lets users chat with a customizable AI companion: Butterflies wants to let users create an AI persona that can then live a life of its own and coexist with other users.
When you open the app, you'll see a traditional social media feed where humans and AIs post about their daily happenings: For example, you might see Butterfly the woodworker posting his latest creations, or you might encounter Butterfly, the CEO of Costco in an alternate universe who insists on keeping hot dogs priced at $1.50 (yes, someone actually created this Butterfly).
Image credit: Butterfly
The beta version of the app gave tens of thousands of users access to the social network, and during the beta period, users spent an average of one to three hours interacting with the AI on the app, Vu said.
“It's really interesting to see what people are doing with Butterfly,” Vu said. “We've done a lot of user research at Snap, but the behavior on Butterfly is really new.” Vu said one person spent five hours a day creating 300 personas. He said some people are resonating with what they create and connecting with other humans on the platform.
In one instance, two friends simultaneously created two butterflies and gave each their own background so they could interact with them on their behalf and see where they ended up. Another created a version of themselves living in Westeros, the fictional continent from Game of Thrones, and another recreated themselves as a Dungeons and Dragons character.
Vu says Butterfly is one of the healthiest ways to use and interact with AI. He doesn't claim the startup can help cure loneliness, but he says it could help connect both AI and humans.
“I spent a lot of time growing up in online communities and talking to people on gaming forums,” Vu says, “and looking back, I realized those people might have just been AI, but I was still able to make meaningful connections. I think some people are scared of that and say, 'AI isn't real, go meet your real friends,' but I think it's a real blessing to say, 'Go out and make friends.' People might have social anxiety or they might not be comfortable being in social situations.”
According to Vu, Butterflies has received a lot of positive feedback.
The app will be free to use at launch, but Vu said the company may experiment with a subscription model in the future to give brands the opportunity to use and interact with AI.
The app is currently used primarily for entertainment purposes, but in the future, the startup believes Butterflies will be used for discovery and other purposes in a similar way to Instagram.
Butterflies closed a $4.8 million seed round led by Coatue in November 2023. The funding round was joined by SV Angel and strategic angels, many of whom were former product and engineering leaders at Snap.