Quora launched a platform called Poe this week to allow people to ask questions and get instant answers. Poe is short for “Platform for Open Exploration” and is currently only available for iOS. A Quora spokesperson said that Poe is “designed to allow people to easily interact with different AI agents.”
“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 Quora 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.”
Poe is not an attempt to create an AI model that looks like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, which can answer questions on topics as diverse as poetry and coding, has been controversial for its inability to give convincing answers that are actually false.
Earlier this month, Stack Overflow temporarily banned users from sharing content generated by ChatGPT. They claimed that the AI made it too easy to generate answers and flood the site with dubious answers.
Quora could have been in serious trouble if it had trained a chatbot from its vast crowdsourced collection of questions and answers.
Some users might have objected to their content being used this way, especially since some AI systems can regurgitate portions of the data they are trained on (e.g., code).
Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are being sued in a lawsuit class. They are accused of violating copyright law because they allowed Copilot to regurgitate portions of licensed code without credit.
ArtStation, an art community portal, allowed AI-generated art earlier this year. Members protested by placing “No AI Art” images in their portfolios.
Poe allows access to several AI models that generate text, including ChatGPT, at launch. OpenAI does not currently offer ChatGPT a public API. A spokesperson for Quora refused to confirm whether Quora has a partnership for Poe with OpenAI or some other form of early access.
Poe is a text-messaging app for AI models, and users can chat separately. Poe offers a variety of suggestions and uses cases for conversations, including “writing help,” “cooking,” “problem-solving,” or “nature.”
“We think this will be a fun way for people to interact with and explore different language models. Poe is designed to be the best way for someone to get an instant answer to any question they have, using natural conversation,” the Quora Spokesperson said.
“There is an incredible amount of research and development going into advancing the capabilities of these models, but in order to bring all that value to people around the world, there is a need for good interfaces that are easy to use. We hope we can provide that interface so that as all of this development happens over the years ahead, everyone around the world can share as much as possible in the benefits.”
It is well-known that AI chatbots such as ChatGPT can produce biased, racist, and other toxic content.
Quora isn’t taking any steps to stop this and instead relies on Poe’s providers to filter and moderate the content. The spokesperson stated that “The model providers have put in a lot of effort to prevent the bots from generating unsafe responses”
The spokesperson stated that “The whole field is moving very rapidly now and we’re more interested in figuring out what problems we can solve for people with Poe”
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