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Is a generative AI platform the place customers can create their very own text-based chatbots and “AI girlfriends” value greater than $16 million? Investors in MyShell appear to assume so, as the corporate simply introduced a $11 million pre-series A spherical from Dragonfly, Delphi Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Maven11 Capital, Nascent, Nomad Capital, OKX Ventures, following its $5.6 million pre-seed final 12 months, bringing its whole fundraise to $16.6 million to this point.
With creators in Singapore and Tokyo, MyShell emerged from stealth final 12 months, and is probably greatest identified for its AI character and user-generated bot creation platform in addition to its open-source voice cloning mannequin OpenVoice, unveiled firstly of 2024. The platform is accessible on the internet although customers can even work together with MyShell’s chatbots on Discord and Telegram.
Users can select to speak in textual content, audio, and even animated video with bots created by MyShell’s builders, or by different customers, or to make their very own bot and select the underlying AI mannequin that powers its interactions.
In a video name interview with VentureBeat, MyShell CEO and co-founder Ethan Sun mentioned, “the concept of beginning MyShell is that we need to actually push ahead the open developments on numerous AI basis fashions.”
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Right now, MyShell helps integration with OpenAI’s GPT-3.5/4 by way of its API (so the consumer doesn’t pay OpenAI, MyShell does) and its personal MyShell LLM or “ShellLLM,” which the corporate says was educated utilizing “huge personal knowledge from novel, motion pictures, anime and TV reveals to make the roleplay expertise extra human like.”
In a method, MyShell is much like Character AI and even OpenAI’s GPT Builder and GPT Store, offering a straightforward pure language path to constructing AI chatbots with distinctive and distinct “personalities,” identities, response types, and topics of experience, in addition to a method for chatbot makers to share their chatbots with the world, and customers to entry and work together with them.
A crypto play below the hood
Unlike different AI bot creation platforms, MyShell additionally points its personal blockchain-based cryptocurrencies that customers can purchase: the Shell Coin and $SHELL token for which it may be exchanged, each of which the platform will finally settle for as a technique to entry premium options and reward the creators of its user-generated AI bots.
To create a bot or AI character on MyShell, you join for the platform at https://app.myshell.ai/ and click on the “Workshop” tab and observe the directions, filling out varieties and fields to make your customized AI-powered chatbot. MyShell affords its tokens as rewards to incentivize extra creators of latest chatbots,.
Sun mentioned that MyShell may even supply its personal type of incentives to creators whose bots obtain essentially the most engagement within the type of further tokens — taking a web page out of OpenAI’s GPT Store, which additionally promised a income sharing program for builders of customized GPTs within the first quarter of this 12 months, however which has but to ship on that plan.
MyShell plans to generate income from three foremost sources: charging creators actual, fiat foreign money for selling their MyShell-made chatbots on its major touchdown pages; charging subscriptions to shoppers for heavy utilization; and charging charges to customers who want to make investments their very own tokens in fashionable AI chatbots.
AI girlfriends, copyrighted characters, and productiveness apps
So far, the corporate has promoted the creation of “AI girlfriends” and even hosts many user-generated chatbots primarily based on copyrighted popular culture characters equivalent to Walter White from Breaking Bad and Rick Sanchez from Rick & Morty that may chat with customers in textual content, animated video, and voice.
In reality, the primary MyShell AI chatbot made by the corporate’s founders was referred to as “Samantha,” designed for the chat software Telegram, and which MyShell says is “paying tribute to the AI assistant Samantha from the 2013 film Her.”
Asked about its give attention to AI girlfriends or companions and the truth that such a promotion might learn to many customers as sexist or dehumanizing, Sun instructed VentureBeat that “character is only one subset of all of the generic AI purposes” that customers can entry and construct, and famous that the corporate affords NSFW toggles to customers to permit what content material they really feel snug interacting with on the platform.
On its net app, MyShell additionally highlights user-generated chatbots for translation, psychotherapy, emblem design, resume critiquing and writing, coding, fortune telling and tarot studying, and plenty of extra.
Already, MyShell counts greater than 1,000,000 registered customers and 50,000 “creators” — individuals who construct AI bots with its platform.
With the brand new funding spherical, the corporate intends to “add assets into the event of its open-source foundational mannequin; empower AI creators; foster a very democratic AI creator platform; and additional help the open-source neighborhood,” in keeping with a press launch despatched to VentureBeat below embargo.
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https://venturebeat.com/ai/openvoice-creator-myshell-gets-11m-to-build-out-crypto-ai-platform/
