Poe is a new AI product that allows users to ask questions, get instant answers, and engage in conversations with AI-powered bots. It is currently available on iOS with plans to expand to other platforms. The AI on Poe is powered by models from OpenAI and Anthropic, with the goal of creating a diverse ecosystem of AI models for various tasks. Poe aims to simplify the process for AI developers to reach a wider audience and collectively explore the capabilities of new AI models. Quora, the platform behind Poe, sees AI as a tool to accelerate knowledge sharing. Users can try out Poe on iOS and provide feedback for future improvements.

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. 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 here, but feel free to read on below if you’re curious about why we’re building it.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. I expect this AI technology wave to be far more transformative than the personal computer, the internet, or the smartphone, and I expect it to have a much larger and more positive impact on society and on the world economy. Most importantly for Quora’s mission to share and grow the world’s knowledge, as AI gets better and better, it will create the potential for vastly improved knowledge sharing relative to what is possible today. 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 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, but we are starting from scratch in building Poe as a new product. Poe’s role in the AI ecosystem The AI on Poe is currently powered by models from OpenAI and Anthropic. However, 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. Some people or companies will train their own models from scratch, and others will fine tune models created by others. A growing ecosystem is already developing to support all of this, but we expect it to get much larger and result in a wide diversity of models useful for different tasks. 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. 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. 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 created on Poe. We are in the process of making an API that will make it easy for any AI developer to plug their model into Poe, but if you are a developer and would like early access, please reach out to us. 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. 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. 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. Quora’s role in the AI ecosystem Even with superhuman AI, there will always be a vast amount of knowledge in people’s heads that has never been communicated and is therefore inaccessible to AI and to the rest of the world unless people share it. People wrote more answers on Quora in the last week than during any prior week in our history, and we hope that AI can further accelerate the sharing of this knowledge, just like the internet did. As a quick note for Quora creators, we are not currently training the language models in Poe using the writing that everyone has shared on Quora. If we do this in the future, we will allow creators to opt out if they want. We think letting AI learn from what you have written can be a powerful way to help the rest of the world, as many other people will later learn from the AI, similarly to how a teacher might judge their own success not just by how well their students are educated but by all the downstream impact their students have on the world. However, we respect that some people might have a different view and we do not want to impose it on everyone who decides to share their knowledge on Quora. Next steps Please keep in mind that the AI available through Poe is not perfect, so it will be useful in some cases but not in others. We will do our best to fix the problems within our control as quickly as possible, but it will take time for AI research to continue to advance to the point where many of the flaws today are addressed. Until that happens, we hope the sharing features on Poe will help you discover use cases where it can be useful immediately. If you’re interested and you have an iPhone or iPad, you’re welcome to try out Poe starting today by visiting poe.com. We will be working very hard to fix any problems that come up during this launch, so please send us any bugs or other feedback you have. We are also going to be working very hard to finish support for our Android, web, and desktop clients, and to open up access to all developers as soon as we can handle that. We will be doing our best to build Poe as quickly as possible so that everyone can benefit from AI as this incredible technology becomes available to the world.