Quora’s Poe aims to become a one-stop destination for all AI chatbot interaction

Today, we are opening up public access to a new AI product we have been building called Poe. Poe lets people ask questions, get instant answers, and have back-and-forth conversations with several AI-powered bots. (1/n) pic.twitter.com/G9LeO45sc8

— Adam D’Angelo (@adamdangelo) February 3, 2023

But that’s not all. D’Angelo seems to have broadened Poe’s scope significantly, declaring now that it will support “several bots.” Based on the information shared by him on Twitter, Poe’s goal is to become a bot aggregator of sorts, helping users access several different chatbots optimised for different tasks from a single app.

D’Angelo anticipates that there will be several models like GPT-3.5 and chatbots like ChatGPT in the near future. These will “represent different points of view, or they will have access to different knowledge.” He says that making such models useful for the public requires a fast and easy-to-use interface, but believes that the companies behind these models are “not well suited to create these interfaces.”

Poe’s goal will be to fill this gap and “reduce the amount of work needed for any AI developer to reach a large audience of users.” To make this possible, Quora is developing an API that will let AI developers plug their model into Poe.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are essentially deep learning algorithms trained on enormous amounts of text data, generally with the goal of mimicking human speech. But since they are just algorithms without an interface of their own, users can’t directly interact with them. Poe is attempting to become a one-stop solution for such LLMs, helping give them a unified interface, so that users don’t have to rely on multiple interfaces to interact with each of them.

“Over time, we hope to become the most efficient way for people to collectively explore the possibilities opened up by new AI models as they are released. The name Poe is short for “Platform for Open Exploration” to reflect this intent.”

Poe sounds like an ambitious project, but AI is a deeply competitive space right now, with companies like Google and Microsoft pouring billions into LLMs/chatbots to gain an edge over each other. It remains to be seen if such companies will actually join hands to plug into Poe.