Quora, the renowned Q&A platform, has opened the doors to its new AI chatbot app named Poe, allowing users to engage with a variety of AI chatbots, including those developed by OpenAI and other companies like Anthropic. Apart from serving as a playground for users to experiment with new AI technologies, Poe’s content will also play a crucial role in the continuous evolution of Quora itself.
Initially introduced in December, Poe’s mobile app required an invitation to access. However, with the recent public launch, the app is now available to anyone, starting with iOS users. Quora has promised Android and other platform versions in the coming months.
According to Quora, the decision to launch Poe as an independent product was motivated by the rapid advancements and changes in the AI field. Nevertheless, there will be some integration between the Q&A platform and Poe. When the content generated by Poe’s chatbots meets Quora’s high quality standards, it may be distributed on the main Quora site, potentially reaching its vast community of 400 million monthly visitors.
To utilize Poe, iOS users need to create a verified account by providing both their phone number and email address. Once registered, users can freely switch between three different AI chatbots available at launch: Sage, Claude, and Dragonfly. OpenAI powers Sage and Dragonfly, while Anthropic technology powers Claude. Each chatbot has its own limitations, such as incomplete knowledge of events after 2021 or the refusal to answer certain questions. Consequently, Quora has opted to keep Poe separate from its service until these limitations are resolved.
The concerns raised by inaccuracies in AI chatbots, like ChatGPT from OpenAI, have cast doubt on the technology’s readiness for widespread use. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, recently reported that ChatGPT often produces incorrect answers to math problems phrased in natural language. In response, Q&A site Stack Overflow prohibited users from sharing answers generated by ChatGPT due to these inaccuracies.
However, Quora perceives Poe as a valuable tool for AI developers to enhance the usefulness of their models for the public. Poe’s user-friendly chat interface addresses a crucial aspect often overlooked by companies solely focused on building AI models.
Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo explained in a blog post, “Most people and even most companies who are capable of training or fine-tuning these models are not well suited to create these interfaces. This is particularly true in the back-and-forth dialogue paradigm that has become standard for question answering and other use of large language models like ChatGPT, but we expect it to become useful for other modalities as well. We hope that Poe can fill this gap and greatly reduce the amount of work needed for any AI developer to reach a large audience of users.”
To further support developers, Quora plans to offer an API that allows any AI developer to integrate their model into Poe, thus enabling them to connect with a substantial public audience.
D’Angelo emphasized in a Twitter thread, “We foresee a large number of models available in the near future. Different models will be optimized for different tasks, represent different points of view, or have access to different knowledge.”
In addition to its primary function as an AI chatbot app, Poe also incorporates social components. Users can create profiles, follow others, and publish model output on their profiles, making it accessible to their followers. Noteworthy posts will be shared with all Poe users via the app’s feed, where individuals can Like or Repost the chatbot Q&A sessions. Navigating through the feed is reminiscent of browsing Stories on other social apps, as users can tap on the screen to advance or go back to previous posts.
Poe is available for free download on the App Store and does not include any in-app purchases.
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