Snapchat Partners with Google for Expanded AI Push

This is interesting.

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has confirmed that the company is now integrating more elements of Google’s Gemini AI system to power its own AI elements, as it looks to build on its AI functionality.

But what’s particularly interesting here is that thus far, Snap’s “My AI” bot, its primary generative AI element, has been powered by OpenAI’s GPT models, whom Snap has worked in partnership with for over a year.

So why the change to Google now, and what do Google’s models offer that OpenAI’s do not?

According to reports, integrating Gemini capacity will better enable My AI to understand different types of information, including text, audio, images, and videos.

As explained by Snap CEO Evan Spiegel:

“My AI is a brilliant best friend powered by artificial intelligence. It’s a chat bot where you can ask general knowledge questions, learn more about the world, and have a fun and friendly conversation. As we started partnering with Google and experimenting with Gemini’s capability, what we found was an unbelievable ability to help people solve their problems based on visual context.

Which suggests that Google’s systems are currently better at handling multimodal inputs than OpenAI, while Spiegel also points to Google’s translation capabilities as another reason for the shift.

It’s not clear at this stage whether Snap’s moving entirely away from OpenAI for its AI integrations, but it certainly seems as though Snap will be leaning on Google’s tools more moving forward.

Because they better suit how Snap users engage with AI, and it’s interesting to consider whether that might also be reflective of a broader shift towards Gemini, and other models, and away from OpenAI’s tools.

OpenAI, of course, quickly became the leader in the AI race with the launch of ChatGPT, but both Meta and Google are also developing more powerful models, with expanded capacity, which could supersede OpenAI’s capabilities. xAI is also developing its own, more powerful AI models, but thus far, Meta and Google seem to be leading the way on multimodal translation and integration into AI responses.

Which could make them more appealing for more platforms moving forward.

It’s not necessarily indicative of a major market swing as yet, but it is interesting that Snap’s looking to shift to Gemini instead of GPT for its expanded AI push.