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Quora introduces Poe, a way to talk to AI chatbots like ChatGPT

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Quora this week launched Poe, a platform that allows individuals to ask questions, get instant answers, and engage in back-and-forth conversation with AI chatbots, indicating its involvement in text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT.

Poe
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Short for “Platform for Open Exploration,” Poe — which is invite-only and currently only available on iOS — is “designed to be a place where people can easily interact with a number of different AI agents,” a Quora spokesperson told TechCrunch via text message.

“We have learned a lot about building consumer internet products over the last 12 years building and operating Quora. And we are specifically experienced in serving people who are looking for knowledge,” the spokesperson said. “We believe much of what we’ve learned can be applied to this new domain where people are interfacing with large language models.”

Source: techcrunch.com

Poe, then, isn’t an attempt to develop a ChatGPT-like Ai system from the ground up. ChatGPT, which is adept at responding to questions on various topics from literature to coding, has been the source of debate due to its ability to provide responses that sound persuasive but aren’t factually correct.

Stack Overflow, a Q&A coding site, temporarily prohibited users from trying to share content generated by ChatGPT this month, claiming that the AI made it too simple for visitors to create responses and overflow the site with questionable answers.

Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI, for example, are being sued in a class action lawsuit for allegedly violating copyrighted material by letting Copilot simply repeat sections of licensed code without credit. Representatives of the art society portal ArtStation, which started enabling AI-generated craft on its platform earlier this year, began extensively rebelling by placing No AI Art images in their portfolios.

Poe’s initial release includes access to many text-generating Ai applications, including ChatGPT. At the moment, OpenAI does not offer a public API for ChatGPT. A Quora spokesperson declined to comment as to whether Quora does indeed have an alliance with OpenAI for Poe or some other form of early access.

Poe functions similarly to a text messenger app but for AI models the users can communicate with the models separately. Poe’s chat interface offers a variety of topics of conversation and use cases, such as posting help, preparing food, solving problems, and nature.

Poe comes with only a few models at launch, but Quora intends to add a way for model providers, such as businesses, to submit their systems for incorporation soon.

For the time being, Quora says it is concentrating on scalability, gathering feedback from beta testers, and addressing any issues that arise.

Quora: A billion dollar question

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When you have a question or query in mind where you head for? Google, right? And when even Google fails to provide you satisfactory answer, you look for experts whom you can ask your question. While there are many forums and question answer platforms for specific niche like programming, android, Quora is one of the most popular question answer platform where you can ask or answer literary anything. Which other platform offers such liberty, engagement and answers from experts like Mark Zukerberg (Facebook CEO), Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO), Demi Moore, Marc Andreessen (VC)?

While working for Facebook,  Adam D’Angelo felt that Facebook was stable now and he could leave. The co-founders of Quora Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever were having lunch in a Chinese restaurant and had a talk about the knowledge that is not shared on the internet or the knowledge that one has in his brain but is not shared. This problem statement gave rise to the development of “Quora”. Both had a vision in mind that there are lot many questions in our mind which are left unanswered and where many use internet to find answers, Quora could be the best solution to help with answers for these questions. They had a hard time deciding the name. After a lot of research and shortlisting many names which delineated questions and answers finally “Quora” was finalized.

Image Credit: WIkipedia
Image Credit: WIkipedia

With a prototype code ready to be enhanced and developed they started with the development process in 2009. They had a code ready which they had to further develop. In a year they made the website available for public use. In the beginning they invited their friends to the site, who invited their friends which led to increase in the number of users significantly.

Quora has a community of people which consisted of Mark Zuckerberg, big business tycoons, VC’s, Entrepreneurs, people with excellent knowledge about a particular field, authors and bigwigs like Barrack Obama. This increased the quality of knowledge shared on Quora. Later on they also added credits and gifts feature, wherein if your answer was the best and good quality you would get credits for that. Quora also added a feature of blogging to let people share their knowledge and thoughts without limiting it to question answers format.

Once Mark Zuckerberg asked the Quora community that which company could help Facebook grow, and he ended up in buying “NEXTSTOP” which was a start-up. So this is what made Quora different than other sites. It bridged the gap between Twitter and Facebook.  Since then Quora has come a long way where users can Upvote, Downvote and see the number of views. The continuous innovation has kept users engaged and its popularity has grown. Today there are approximately 100 million monthly users who visit the website.