ChatGPT is an amazing piece of technology but a terrible consumer product. OpenAI’s revolutionary Chatbot can be loaded at any time. After a long wait, ChatGPT will prompt you with a message that ChatGPT has reached its limit and cannot be used. The interface is not well-designed and slow, even in the most ideal of circumstances. It doesn’t even have a mobile app.
Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo sees this as a great opportunity. Quora began work last summer on Poe, a new app that D’Angelo hopes will make it easier to use bots by bringing them together in one place. He says, “We have many different things that we want to add on top of this technology.” “But the beginning point is to make it simple for people to use it.”
D’Angelo believes we’re just at the beginning of an enormous boom in interactive bots. Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT are the only ones available right now. But, soon there will be thousands or millions of bots that serve different purposes. Even for companies that aren’t tech giants, it’s too hard to create a high-quality chat experience. Google and Microsoft have the resources, but I doubt you’ll see them in Poe any time soon. There are still many bot startups.
D’Angelo likens Poe’s ambitions with a web browser. Instead of requiring every service to have and manage its own full-stack apps on every platform, he hopes developers will be able to build bots and make it easy for users to find them through Poe. D’Angelo states that they hope to make it easier for developers to create great user experiences and enable an explosion in applications by lowering the barriers.
Quora began investigating the use of generative AI tools to answer Quora’s questions. D’Angelo claims he’s been thinking about AI for years and was a member of OpenAI’s board when he predicted the chatbot explosion. He says that even OpenAI was shocked at how large it became.
After some testing, AI Quora’s answers still didn’t feel right. D’Angelo states that AI Quora answers can sometimes generate very good answers, but it can’t always generate the same quality answer as the best person writing one. So the team asked: When could these really good answers be most helpful? They’re very, very fast. It’s when you need an immediate answer or when you want to exchange ideas with the person (the AI in this case) writing the answer.
You can download the Poe app for iOS right now (Android is apparently coming soon). Or go to poe.com and you’ll be dropped into what appears to be a messaging app. The right side shows a chat window that is empty. There are a few suggestions at the top, such as “Try asking about writing help/cooking/fun stuff” and similar. A text box can be found at the bottom. You can interact with six bots within Poe.
Poe has access to ChatGPT, GPT-4, Claude Plus, and Claude Instant. Sage is a bot that was trained on GPT-2. Dragonfly is a model that uses a different approach than the rest. Chat with any one of the six bots is like flipping between conversations among friends. You can only send one message per day to GPT-4, three to Claude, and you can also subscribe to Poe’s $19.99 a monthly Pro service to increase your cap. Poe’s long term plan also includes subscriptions to bots. This plan is reminiscent of Apple’s App Store revenue split.
The differences between the bots have been minimal in my testing. Poe’s documentation suggests using Claude Instant for creative writing over Claude Plus, but Claude Plus works better for more complex tasks. ChatGPT and Sage are more proficient in non-English languages while Dragonfly is less adept at complex tasks. D’Angelo believes that GPT-4 is the best at almost everything.
He is betting that over time there will be many bots, each with a different function or designed to process a particular type of information. Poe will be a kind of Swiss Army knife for AI tools in the future. He says, “We want the button to be the right one for the task.” “If I am programming, which bots are best to assist me? What’s the best tool for writing?
Talking to ChatGPT through Poe will give you the same answers as talking to OpenAI’s app.
Talking to ChatGPT through Poe will give you the same answers as OpenAI’s app. You shouldn’t visit Poe to search for current information or web searches — Poe does not have any web links in its answers. However, it does provide some terms that you can click on to get additional information. D’Angelo said that he believes bots will become more grounded in reality as time goes by. Poe, in particular, hopes to use Quora data, but that’s still some way off.
Poe is still my favorite chatbot app for AI chat and content generation. For one, it’s very fast. It is also much more pleasant to type into a mobile application than into ChatGPT’s sluggish website. The app’s dark mode, which is white-on-black, and the ability to sync all my chats across different devices are both great features. The only problem is the constant stream of suggestions for what to type or people to follow. This often gets in the way when I want to see my chats. It’s also the most natural-feeling AI messaging application I have found.
Poe’s mobile application also offers a Feed feature that allows you to share prompts and get responses from bots. My feed has mostly been filled with bots sharing silly poems and pseudo-deep thoughts, but the idea behind public conversations is intriguing. This is also where Poe begins to feed into Quora. If these bot conversations start to generate useful and fresh information, and users decide that the information is worth sharing and valuable, then that output could be quite valuable.
D’Angelo, on the other hand, isn’t certain what will work or not. He believes that anyone who is sure is wrong. “Nobody knows everything, because technology is new and has not been used often enough. It’s also changing rapidly so nobody really knows what it is.” D’Angelo says that his team can only plan for a week at most. If you zoom in too much, everything will change by the end of your planning meeting. D’Angelo believes that there are many important questions to be answered about safety and data usage, but he is confident that the good outweighs any negatives.
It’s still very much alive and well that the AI land grab will continue. However, it is not certain that many companies will give this area of the ecosystem over to Poe or any other similar company. Everyone’s favorite way of making a fortune is vertical integration. D’Angelo believes he has a chance. He says, “If you are Microsoft and you make Bing, you will just make that effort to make your product available on all platforms.” But almost anyone else? “But almost anyone else?
