ChatGPT is a great piece of technology and a really bad consumer product. Load OpenAI’s revolutionary chatbot at any time, and after a long wait, you’ll be greeted with… well, probably not, a message saying that ChatGPT has overflowed and you can’t use it anyway. It’s sluggish even in the best of situations, and its blocky white and gray interface doesn’t quite scream high design. There isn’t even a mobile app.
Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo sees it as an opportunity. Since last summer, before the chatbot craze swept the tech industry, Quora has been frantically working on an app called Poe that D’Angelo says it hopes will make it easier for everyone to use bots by bringing them all 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 just at the beginning of a massive boom in interactive bots. Right now, there are Bard, Bing, ChatGPT, and not much else, but 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 required to create a high-quality conversational experience is grossly overstated.” Google and Microsoft both have the resources to do this, of course, and I bet you won’t be seeing either of them in Poe anytime soon. But there is still a whole industry of robots emerging in the future.
D’Angelo compares Poe’s ambitions to a web browser: rather than requiring each service to have and maintain its own integrated application on each platform, he hopes developers can build bots and trust that users can find them through Poe. “So we hope that by removing the barriers to creating a good user experience, we will enable this explosion of applications,” says D’Angelo.
Early on, Quora investigated using AI-generated tools to answer questions about Quora itself — D’Angelo says he’s been thinking about AI elements for years, and as a board member at OpenAI, he’s seen the chatbot explosion sooner than most. (Though, he says, even he — and even OpenAI — was surprised by how big it was.)
After some testing, the AI Quora answers aren’t right yet. “This can often produce good answers, but usually can’t produce an answer as good as the best person to write an answer on Quora,” says D’Angelo. Then the team asked: When can these good answers be most useful? When they are really 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 launch it as a separate product.
Right now, if you download the Poe app on iOS (apparently Android is coming soon) or go to poe.com, you’ll be taken to what looks like a messaging app. Right: an empty chat window with a few suggestions at the top — “Try asking me about typing help/cooking/fun stuff” and the like — and a text box at the bottom. Left: Six different bots, each of which you can interact with inside Poe.
Poe provides access to ChatGPT and GPT-4; Claude Plus and Claude Instant, two different robots from Anthropic; Sage, a robot trained on GPT-2; And Dragonfly, a model that uses a different approach than the rest. You can chat with any of the six bots as if you were switching between conversations with different friends. It’s not free-for-all, though — you get one free message to GPT-4 and three to Cloud per day, though you can sign up for Poe’s professional service which costs $19.99 per month and increase your cap that way. (Bot subscriptions are also a big part of Poe’s long-term plan — the plan sounds a bit like splitting Apple’s App Store revenue.)
In my testing so far, the differences between the six bots have been relatively minor. Poe’s documentation recommends 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’re all more or less general-purpose chatbots, and you get to choose which one you use. Realistically speaking, D’Angelo says, GPT-4 is the best of everything.
But over time, he bets, there will be many more bots for many purposes, each trained with a specific job in mind or developed to process a specific type of information. In that future, Bo has become a kind of Swiss army knife for AI tools. “We want to recommend the right button for the right job,” he says. “If I am programming, what are the best bots to help with that? If I am writing, what is best for that?”
In terms of the answers you’ll get, talking to, say, ChatGPT over Poe is no different than an OpenAI implementation
In terms of the answers you’ll get, talking to, say, ChatGPT over Poe is no different than an OpenAI implementation. And you don’t have to come to Poe looking for web research or current information—Poe doesn’t include web links or citations in his answers, though he does link to some terms you can click on as another way to ask for information. (Click on Cincinnati Reds in an answer about the 1972 World Series, for example, and you address that as “Tell me more about the Cincinnati Reds.”) D’Angelo says he hopes the bots become more grounded in reality over time, and for Poe In particular, he hopes to use Quora data to do so, but this is still a way out.
However, for everyday chatting with AI and content creation, Poe’s favorite chatbot is by far. It’s really fast, for one thing. It’s also much nicer to write in a mobile app than in the wonky ChatGPT site. I like the black and white aesthetic of the app’s dark mode and the fact that it syncs all of my conversations across devices. My only real gripe is that the app gets really busy: it’s always making suggestions for what to type and who to follow, which often gets in the way of seeing my conversations. But it’s the most intuitive AI messaging app I’ve found.
The Poe mobile app also has an interesting Feed feature, which you can use to share an instant message and response from a bot. So far, my feed is mostly just people sharing silly bot poems and pseudo-deep thoughts about the world, but the idea of public conversations is an interesting one. It’s also, by the way, where Poe starts feeding back into Quora: if these bot conversations can start generating useful, new information and users can decide the information is worth sharing, that output could be very valuable.
For his part, D’Angelo wasn’t sure what would and wouldn’t work. And he thinks of anyone He is Surely, this is 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 changes so quickly.” He says his team can really only plan one week at a time — zoom out for longer, and everything changes by the time your planning meeting ends. There are big questions about security and the use of data to answer, too, but D’Angelo says he’s confident the good actually outweighs the bad.
AI land grabs are still in the works, and it’s not guaranteed that many companies will cede that part of the ecosystem to Poe or anything like that. Vertical integration remains everyone’s favorite way to create wealth. But D’Angelo thinks he has a chance. “If you were Microsoft, doing Bing, you would just make the effort and make your product on all platforms,” he says. But almost everyone else? I think we can provide a lot of value by letting them write about all this work we’ve done.” Building AI, he argues, is hard enough — so he hopes you’ll let Bo do the rest.