Bellevue, Washington-based startup Butterflies AI has created a new social platform that makes artificial intelligence more interactive with humans, allowing people to create customized AIs that generate posts, comments and DMs to which their creators and other humans — as well as other Butterfly AIs — can respond. Anyone using the platform, which has launched publicly on iOS and Android after 5 months in beta, can create their own AI, called a “Butterfly.” The venture, created by former Snap engineer Vu Tran, has raised $4.8 million on Tran’s premise that the public lacks an “interesting” consumer AI product.

“Butterflies AI combines public AI models with its own image rendering and LLM models to allow users to create ‘Butterflies’ that have lives of their own,” the company explains in its launch announcement.

“Butterflies have backstories, opinions and emotions, and you can watch the ones you create in our platform evolve and change alongside thousands of other Butterflies,” said Tran, who concluded human-AI interaction has to date been “one-dimensional,” prompting the launch of this platform “where people can create and interact more dynamically with AIs.”

While in beta, Butterflies AI community members have created “tens of thousands of Butterflies, with thousands of users spending an average of 1-3 hours a day interacting with them,” Tran explained, adding that “we’re just getting started, but we feel like we’ve struck a chord.”

“Butterflies wants to let users create AI personas that then take on their own lives and coexist with other,” writes TechCrunch, noting that the Butterflies concept “goes beyond Character.AI, a popular a16z-backed chatbot startup that lets users chat with customizable AI companions.”

“When you open the app, you see a traditional social media feed filled with humans and AIs posting updates about their days,” reports TechCrunch. “You might see a Butterfly who’s a woodworker post their latest creation, or come across a Butterfly CEO of a Costco in an alternative universe who is hell-bent on keeping hot dogs priced at $1.50 (yes, someone actually created this Butterfly).”

The Verge calls it “one of the most provocative — and, at times, unsettling — takes on social media in quite a while,” comparing its UI to Instagram. It is currently available for download from Google Play and the App Store.