Thread by @adamdangelo

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)

It is initially available on iOS, but we will be adding support for all major platforms in the next few months, along with more bots. The best way to learn about Poe is to try it at poe.com, but read on below if you’re curious about why we’re building it. (2/n)

As you may have observed through developments in image and text generation over the last year, researchers are making incredible progress toward creating human-level AI. And this progress is accelerating. (3/n)

There is still a lot of work to do before this potential will be realized, both in AI research and in applying that research to build products. But these developments are happening so quickly and they call for such fundamental changes to how products should be built... (4/n)

...that we are building Poe as a new product independent of Quora. At the same time, we will evolve Quora itself as AI enables better experiences, and we will distribute content created on Poe on Quora when it meets a high enough quality standard. (5/n)

We foresee a large number of models 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. (6/n)

Some people or companies will train their own models from scratch, and others will fine tune models created by others. A growing ecosystem is developing to support all of this, but we expect it to get much larger and result in a wide diversity of models. (7/n)

However, beyond training a model, making that model useful for the public requires a fast and easy-to-use interface, and most people and even most companies who are capable of training or fine tuning these models are not well suited to create these interfaces. (8/n)

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. (9/n)

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. Quora has 400M monthly unique visitors and we’ll be making it easy for all of them to use Poe and to see the best content. (10/n)

We are in the process of making an API that will make it easy for any AI developer to plug their model into Poe. (11/n)

We have also seen that the capabilities of these AI models are best discovered collectively, with people teaching each other what is possible and sharing inspiration for the wide diversity of use cases that are possible. (12/n)

So we have built a feature where people can easily share model output with their followers if they’d like, and we’ll distribute the best examples to all users of Poe. (13/n)

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. (14/n)

More details in the blog post here: quorablog.quora.com/Poe-1 (15/n)

And if you have an iPhone or iPad, you’re welcome to try out Poe starting today by visiting poe.com. (16/n)

We will be doing our best to build Poe as quickly as possible and add support for other platforms and other bots so that everyone can benefit from AI as this incredible technology becomes available to the world. (17/17)