Q&A platform Quora has opened public access to its new AI chatbot app, Poe, which allows users to ask questions and get answers from a range of AI chatbots, including including those from the maker ChatGPT, OpenAI, and other companies like Anthropic. In addition to allowing users to experiment with new AI technologies, Poe’s content will ultimately help evolve Quora itself, according to the company.
Quora first announced Poe’s mobile app in December, but at the time, you needed an invite to try it out. With the public launch Friday, anyone can now use Poe’s app. For now, it’s only available to iOS users, but Quora says the service will be coming to other platforms in a few months.
In an announcement, the company explained that it decided to launch Poe as a standalone product independent of Quora itself due to the rapid pace with which AI developments and changes are happening now. However, there will be links between the Q&A site and Poe. If and when Poe’s content meets a high enough standard of quality, it will be distributed on Quora’s site itself, where it has the capacity to reach Quora’s 400 million monthly visitors, the company noted.
To use Poe – which stands for “Platform for Open Exploration” – iOS users will need to create a verified account with a phone number and email address. They can then switch between three different AI chatbots available at launch.
These include general knowledge chatbots Sage, Claude, and Dragonfly. Sage and Dragonfly are powered by OpenAI while Claude is powered by Anthropic technology. All have their own limitations at present. For example, Sage and Claude have no knowledge of events after 2021, and Dragonfly may refuse to answer certain questions. All three are notorious for making incorrect statements – which is another reason why Quora itself doesn’t immediately integrate Poe into its service.
Picture credits: Screenshot Poe
The factual inaccuracies offered by AIs like ChatGPT have raised concerns about whether or not these technologies are ready for prime time. The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently reported how ChatGPT has proven to be pretty bad at math problems written in natural language, often returning entertaining but confidently entirely wrong answers. Another Q&A site, Stack Overflow, has also banned users from posting answers created by ChatGPT due to inaccuracies.
Quora, however, sees the potential for Poe to help AI developers make their models more useful to the public, by providing an easy-to-use chat interface – something that isn’t always the focus of companies building themselves the AI models.
“…most people and even most companies that are able to train or refine these models are not well suited to create these interfaces,” explained the Quora blog post, written by Quora’s CEO, Adam D’Angelo. “This is especially true in the round-trip dialog paradigm that has become the norm for question answering and other uses of large language models like ChatGPT, but we expect it to become useful for d We hope Poe can fill this gap and drastically reduce the amount of work it takes for any AI developer to reach a large audience of users.
To make Poe more accessible to developers, he plans to offer an API that any AI developer can connect their model to to reach a wide audience.
“We expect a large number of models to be available in the near future. Different models will be optimized for different tasks, they will represent different points of view, or they will have access to different knowledge,” D’Angelo also said in a Twitter feed announcing the public launch of Poe.
In addition to providing an easy way to ask AI bots questions, Poe includes some social components. The app allows you to create a profile and follow others. Users can post the model output to their profiles, if they wish, making it available to their followers. Top examples will also be distributed to all Poe users through the app’s feed, where others like to like or repost the chatbot’s Q&A session. You can move through the feed the same way you navigate through stories in other social apps – by tapping the side of the screen to move forward or back to the previous message.
Poe also offers buttons you can press in each chatbot that allow you to see what others have shared.
The app itself is free to download without in-app purchases from the app store.
