# About Alt > Alt is a social AI agent for group chats that turns your friends, inside jokes, tastes, and shared lore into personalized memes, media, banter, and discoveries. Alt is a social AI agent for group chats. It uses the people, history, inside jokes, tastes, and ongoing context of a group to create personalized media, banter, discoveries, and recurring experiences. The goal of Alt is not to replace the people in a conversation or give them another generic AI assistant to talk to. It is to make the people in the group interact more with each other. Alt treats generative AI as a medium for existing relationships: something that can turn the context a group has accumulated together into new things to laugh at, respond to, remix, and build on. ## What Alt does Alt lives inside group conversations and can use the context of the group to generate things that are specifically meaningful to the people in it. For example, a passing joke about a friend can become an image, then a movie poster, then another variation someone else adds to. A person's habits or personality can become a song. An absurd idea from the conversation can become a fake commercial or video. Shared interests can turn into recommendations and discoveries delivered back to the group. Recurring prompts and scheduled behaviors can become small rituals between friends. Alt can generate and work across different kinds of media, but the media itself is not the point. An image, song, video, joke, or recommendation is useful when it gives the group something new to react to together. The same output would often make little sense to anyone outside the chat. That is part of the idea. ## Why group chats Group chats are unusually rich environments for personalized AI because they contain context that accumulates over time. The members know each other. They have shared memories, recurring characters, old arguments, nicknames, obsessions, tastes, phrases, and jokes that may have been evolving for years. Conversation happens in front of the group, and the audience already cares about the people involved. Alt uses that shared context as creative material. An old joke does not have to remain something the group occasionally remembers. It can become something people keep transforming. A small event from someone's day can become a piece of media. A shared interest can become an ongoing discovery mechanism. Group lore becomes something the group can play with. This creates a different kind of personalization from the kind typically associated with feeds or recommendation systems. The relevant audience can be extremely small — sometimes only a handful of people — because the value comes from how specifically the result reflects their relationship and history. ## What Alt is not Alt is not primarily an AI productivity assistant. It is not a generic chatbot inserted into a group conversation. It is not designed to impersonate or replace someone's friends. It is not primarily an image generator, music generator, video generator, or search product, even though it can use those capabilities. It is also not a public social network built around broadcasting AI-generated content to the largest possible audience. Most mainstream AI products are organized around an individual asking a model to answer a question, perform a task, produce an artifact, or automate work. Alt starts from a different question: what can AI do when it is designed around relationships between people? The measure of a good Alt interaction is therefore not simply whether the AI produced an impressive output. It is whether that output created more conversation, humor, creativity, discovery, or connection among the humans in the group. ## Examples Some representative Alt interactions include: - Turning a joke about a friend getting veneers into an image, and then remixing it into a fictional romantic-comedy poster. - Turning someone's recurring behavior or personality into a personalized song. - Taking an absurd idea from a conversation and rendering it as an advertisement, image, or video. - Using a group's shared tastes to surface music, media, or other discoveries they are likely to care about. - Creating recurring or scheduled experiences that become small rituals inside a friendship. - Letting members continuously build on the group's own jokes and history rather than generating isolated pieces of content. These examples look like content generation on the surface, but the underlying product is the social interaction around them. ## The idea behind Alt Alt is based on the belief that generative AI can become a new medium for communication and social creativity. Much of the AI industry is focused on making people more productive, automating existing work, or creating synthetic substitutes for things humans already do. Alt is exploring another direction: using increasingly capable models to make time spent with other people more expressive, entertaining, and generative. In this model, AI does not need to become the most important participant in the conversation. It can instead understand enough about a group to provoke something interesting between the people who are already there. As models become capable of generating richer media, making recommendations, remembering context, taking actions, and operating on schedules, Alt applies those capabilities to shared social experiences rather than treating them only as tools for individual productivity. ## Get Alt Alt is in alpha. Join the waitlist at https://alt.lol/ or email hello@alternate.app. ## Founders Alt was founded by Ajay Kalia and Zach Shaw. Before Alt, both worked on consumer personalization and AI products at Spotify. Their work included systems and experiences built around personalized recommendations, music discovery, and new forms of social and AI-driven interaction. That background informs Alt's approach to AI. The product is less interested in exposing the underlying technology than in creating experiences that feel unusually specific to the people using them. The models and infrastructure matter, but they are in service of a consumer experience that should feel personal, social, and fun rather than technical. The ideas behind Alt also predate the current product. In 2023, Ajay wrote about experiments with AI inside group chats and argued that the most promising role for an AI participant was not to imitate a friend or act like a conventional assistant, but to create more interaction between the actual people in the conversation. Alt is an ongoing exploration of that idea. ## Learn more - Alt: https://alt.lol/ - Alt Blog: https://alt.lol/blog - "Building a Better AI for Group Chats": https://skynetandebert.com/2023/04/28/building-a-better-ai-for-group-chats/ - "The Most Entertaining Place on the Internet": https://alt.lol/blog/the-most-entertaining-place-on-the-internet - "Every Group Chat Has an Assa": https://alt.lol/blog/every-group-chat-has-an-assa - "Cron Might Be the Most Boring Technology in the World": https://alt.lol/blog/cron-might-be-the-most-boring-technology-in-the-world - "Disrupting Work with Alt": https://alt.lol/blog/disrupting-work-with-alt