ChatGPT is a remarkable piece of technology and a really bad consumer product. Load the revolutionary OpenAI chatbot at any time, and after a long wait, you’ll be greeted with… well, probably not, a message saying that ChatGPT is over capacity and you can’t use it anyway. It’s sluggish even in the best of situations, and its blocky, gray-and-white interface doesn’t exactly scream great design. There isn’t even a mobile app.
Adam D’Angelo, CEO of QuoraHe sees it as an opportunity. Since last summer, just before the chatbot craze took the tech industry by storm, Quora has been working feverishly on an app called Poe which D’Angelo says he hopes he can make bots easier for everyone to use by bringing them all together in one place. “We have a lot of different things that we want to build on top of this technology,” he says. “But the starting point is just, let’s make it easy for people to use.”
The way D’Angelo sees it, we’re only at the beginning of a big boom in interactive bots. Right now, there’s Bard, Bing, ChatGPT, and not much else, but very soon there will be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of different bots for different purposes. And for almost any company that isn’t a tech giant, “the amount of work that goes into creating a high-quality chat experience is just too much.” Google and Microsoft have the resources to do it, of course, and I bet you won’t be seeing either of them in Poe any time soon. But there’s still a whole industry of bot startups left.
D’Angelo likens Poe’s ambitions to a web browser: Rather than requiring each service to have and maintain its own full application on each platform, he hopes developers can create bots and trust that users can find them through Poe. . “So our hope is that by breaking down the barrier to creating a good user experience we’ll make this explosion of apps possible,” says D’Angelo.
Initially, Quora investigated the use of generative AI tools to answer questions on Quora. D’Angelo says he’s been thinking about AI stuff for years and, as a member of the OpenAI board of directors, he saw the chatbot explosion coming sooner than most. (Although, he says, even he, and even OpenAI, were surprised at how big it got.)
After doing some testing, the AI Quora answers still didn’t seem right. “Often you can generate pretty good answers,” D’Angelo says, “but usually you can’t generate as good an answer as the best person on Quora writing an answer.” So the team asked: when could these rather good answers be most useful? When they are very, very fast. “It’s when you need an answer almost immediately, or when you want to be able to go back and forth with the person, the AI, in this case, typing the answer.” So instead of forcing AI conversations on Quora, the company decided to release it as a separate product.
Right now, if you download the Poe app on iOS (Android is coming soon, apparently) or go to poe.com, you’re in what appears to be a messaging app. On the right: An empty chat window with a bunch of suggestions at the top: “Try asking me about Writing Help/Cooking/Funny Stuff” and the like, and a text box at the bottom. On the left: six different bots, each of which you can interact with inside Poe.
Poe offers access to ChatGPT and GPT-4; Claude Plus and Claude Instant, two different bots from Anthropic; Sage, a bot trained on GPT-2; and Dragonfly, a model that uses a different method from the rest. He can chat with any of the six bots as if he were switching between conversations with different friends. It’s not a free-for-all, though: You get one free message for GPT-4 and three for Claude per day, though you can sign up for Poe’s Pro service for $19.99 a month and increase the limit that way. (Bot subscriptions are also a big part of Poe’s long-term plan; the plan looks a bit like Apple’s App Store revenue split.)
In my tests so far, the differences between the six bots are relatively minor. poe documentation recommends using Claude Instant over Claude Plus for creative writing, but Claude Plus is better for complex tasks. Sage and ChatGPT are better in languages other than English, and Dragonfly “tends to give shorter answers.” But for now, they are all more or less general-purpose chatbots, and it’s up to you to choose which one to use. And realistically, D’Angelo says, GPT-4 is pretty much the best around.
But over time, you’re betting that there will be many bots for many purposes, each trained with a specific function in mind or developed to process a certain type of information. In that future, Poe becomes a sort of Swiss Army knife for AI tools. “We want to start recommending the right button for the right task,” he says. “If I’m programming, what are the best bots to help with that? If I am writing, what is the best for that?
As for the responses you’ll get, talking to, for example, ChatGPT via Poe is no different than doing so via the OpenAI application.
In terms of the responses you’ll get, talking to, say, ChatGPT via Poe is no different than doing so via the OpenAI application. And you shouldn’t come to Poe looking for a web search or current information: Poe doesn’t have web links or citations in his responses, though he does link certain terms that you can click on as another way to request information. (Click on the Cincinnati Reds in an answer about the 1972 World Series, for example, and it processes that as “tell me more about the Cincinnati Reds.”) D’Angelo says he hopes the bots will quickly become more realistic. over time, and especially for Poe, he hopes to use Quora data to do it, but that’s still a way out.
Still, for AI chat and day-to-day content generation, Poe is my favorite chatbot app so far. It’s very fast, for one thing. It’s also much nicer to write on a mobile app than on the shaky ChatGPT website. I like the white-on-black aesthetic of the app’s dark mode and the fact that it syncs all my chats between devices. My only real complaint is that the app is very busy: it’s always offering suggestions for what to write and people to follow, which often just prevents you from seeing my chats. But it’s the most native AI messaging app I’ve come across.
The Poe mobile app also has a cool Feed feature, which you can use to share a notice and a response from one of the bots. So far my feed is mostly people sharing silly bot poems and pseudo-deep thoughts about the world, but the idea of public conversations is intriguing. By the way, it’s also where Poe starts to feed back to Quora: if these bot conversations can start to generate new and useful information, and users can decide that the information is worth sharing, that result could be very valuable.
For his part, D’Angelo isn’t sure what will and won’t work. And he thinks that anyone is sure, it’s wrong. “Nobody knows anything, because the technology hasn’t been around for a long time and we haven’t had time to experiment. But also, nobody knows anything because it’s changing so fast.” He says that his team can only really plan for about a week at a time: get further away and everything will change when the planning meeting is over. There are also big questions to answer about security and data usage, but D’Angelo says he’s confident that the good already far outweighs the bad.
The AI land grab is still going on, and it’s not guaranteed that many companies will cede this part of the ecosystem to Poe or the like. Vertical integration is still everyone’s favorite way to make a fortune. But D’Angelo thinks he has a chance. “If you’re Microsoft and you’re building Bing, you’re going to make that effort and build your product across all platforms,” he says. “But almost someone else? I think we can provide a lot of value by letting them write about all this work that we’ve done.” He argues that building AI is hard enough, so he hopes you let Poe do the rest.
