In November of last year, Adam D’Angelo was at the center of one of the biggest scandals in the tech business. The board of OpenAI, the $80 billion startup that started the AI trend, fired its CEO, Sam Altman, all of a sudden, but then brought him back a few days later. Altman was fired by the board, and D’Angelo was (and still is) on the board that hired him back. Because of the changes that followed, he was the only one who held their seat while most of the other board members left.
OpenAI was having a rough time, but D’Angelo may have had it even worse because his own business, Quora, was also making big steps toward AI at the same time.
D’Angelo co-founded and runs as CEO the public Q&A site Quora. The company had been working on its own AI platform while also raising money (a $75 million round that added $425 million to its value, according to PitchBook). Poe, which stands for “Platform for Open Exploration,” was released by the company in February 2023. It lets users ask questions and talk to different chatbots, lets developers make their own bots, and provides a store and program for making money from bots that are similar to OpenAI’s GPT Store.
There were also big questions about Quora’s main Q&A service. Search engines like Google and Bing were starting to use AI to make their results and answers more fluid. Tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity were also easy for many people to find. What could Quora do to become one of the best websites for getting answers to their questions? More importantly, does anyone want or need open Q&A anymore?
For D’Angelo, these questions are at the heart of his work on AI, which he sees as a key way for people to access the information of the whole Internet. He’s been an important, if quiet, figure in tech for years and has been working to use the Internet’s wealth of knowledge for a long time. He was friends with Mark Zuckerberg in high school and together the two created Synapse, a digital music suggestion service that, according to this old Harvard Crimson article, turned down offers to buy it from Microsoft and others. He later became CTO of Facebook when it was just starting out, and he later helped to start Quora.
It looks like all of that was a long way to get to making AI tools for him. D’Angelo and I recently talked about the problems and chances in AI right now, how to create and help a creator community, and what role people can play in sharing and getting information. Here are some of the most important parts of our talk:
For Now, People Can Answer Questions Better Than AI
It looks like all the talk about AI isn’t changing the way people look for information as much as you might think. D’Angelo said that Quora is getting record numbers of users, even though there are a lot of AI tools available. However, he wouldn’t confirm the 400 million monthly active users number that Quora announced in July.
Still, what Quora set out to do and D’Angelo’s interest in AI are linked. D’Angelo recently told David George, a general partner at a16z, that he was interested in AI, which is why he was drawn to social networking. At that time, it was hard to build the latter, but he saw social networks as a different way to achieve the same goal. He thought that when people were connected in a social network, they were like living, large information models because they could give each other news, entertainment, and more.
He worked on that idea while at Facebook. Later, he started Quora to simplify how social networks could help people get answers. AI is now taking over that job.
“In the past, AI was used instead of people to give answers.” On Quora, you could ask something like, “What is the capital of California?”. People would answer that. “You can now get that answer with AI tools,” he said.
But AI can’t answer all of people’s questions right now, at least not in the way it is now. D’Angelo thinks that helps people keep a lot of their worth.
“Quora was built on the idea that people know a lot of things that aren’t on the internet. “AI will not be able to see any of that information,” D’Angelo said.
It’s hard to trust these kinds of answers because AI still has a problem with hallucinations, even though newer, more advanced models are slowly getting better at fixing this problem.
Giving Coders Help With Poe
Some users were only able to use Poe for a few months in 2017, but then Quora let everyone use it. The company has since added tools to make and look through the bots on its marketplace.
The pitch from the company is that users can use all the different models or bots on the site. For developers, the appeal is that they could reach millions of people without having to worry about how to get their work on different platforms. People who work on Poe can make money in two ways: The first way is when a person becomes a Poe premium subscriber through their bot. The second way is by setting a per-message rate, which means they get paid based on how often people use their bot.
To put it simply, Poe gives developers and users access to different big language models. It works a lot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT Store.
That does mean, though, that both systems have some of the same problems. With prompts, they make it easy for anyone to make bots, which makes it hard for developers to stand out. And D’Angelo told me that there are already a million bots on the site. On ChatGPT, there are three million custom GPTs. To give you an idea, Apple’s App Store took more than five years to reach one million apps.
There is also a lot of spam, bots with similar names, bots that say they can avoid copying, and even bots that are just on the edge of copyright law on both Poe and GPT Store. Poe has also added a tool that lets people talk to more than one bot at the same time. It’s hard to pick a bot that will do the job well with all that noise.
D’Angelo says that Quora wants to help developers make long-term money by making it easier for bots to find questions.
“One of our goals with developers is for them to be able to make a living making AI bots and pay for their own costs,” he said. “Adding pay-per-message is a big step forward, but we also want to help developers get as much distribution as possible inside the platform.” Our suggestion system is being worked on so that more people can learn about the bots.
There Aren’t Any Ads On Poe Yet
Poe is slowly getting bigger, but it’s still not nearly as big as ChatGPT. SimilarWeb, a market research company, says that Poe has 4 million monthly active users in the U.S. (iOS and Android) and 3.1 million monthly active users around the world (Android only). Compared to ChatGPT users, which now have an average of 100 million people per week.
D’Angelo said that the company will not use ads and will instead make money from Poe’s $19.99-a-month subscription service. This is different from some other AI-powered tools on the market, like Perplexity, Bing Search, and Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), which all have ads.
Quora and D’Angelo wouldn’t say how much money they made, but data from analytics firm Sensor Tower shows that since Poe’s start, users have spent $7.3 million on subscriptions, which is the equivalent of about 40,000 paid users. On the other hand, Sensor Tower says that ChatGPT has more than 1 million paid users.
More AI Tools For Poe And Quora
Even though Quora says that replies from real people are important, they are already testing answers written by Poe. The site gives you the AI-written answer to some questions and a link to chat with Poe if you have more questions.
D’Angelo said that Quora already had systems in place to rate the quality of different human comments. These days, it uses methods like surveys to find out if an answer made by AI is useful.
He said, “My goal is for the AI-written answers to be fairly ranked and only to be above a human answer if they are more useful than the human answer.”
He Also Doesn’t Want Quora To Be Known As A “Qnswer engine.”
“I don’t think we ever really thought of Quora as a search engine for answers.” It sounds like there are answers that can only be given by AI. “Quora is really about what people know, and we’ll use AI to make it better,” he said.
Quora is also working on AI tools that people can use to write replies. They hope to have them ready soon. D’Angelo said that one of the tools they are testing lets people make pictures based on the information they give.
AI is also being used in other ways by the company. One is trying to catch bots or people who use software to answer Quora questions. D’Angelo wouldn’t say much about the project because he said the company would let people who are trying to cheat the system know about it.
A few news sources and Quora users have recently said that the quality of answers has dropped dramatically. D’Angelo replied that people think the quality of answers has gone down because bad answers are getting more attention. He said that AI is helping the business tell the difference between answers of different quality, and the early results look good.
About How Quora Works With OpenAI
“I just can’t talk about any of this stuff,” D’Angelo said when asked about the OpenAI drama. “I’m not here to speak for OpenAI. I can just speak for Quora.” Though, he did say that OpenAI is not a competitor for him because the bigger company has, well, bigger goals.
It seems like some of the things that people can do on the GPT Store and Poe are the same. In the big picture, though, that’s not important. OpenAI is working on a big project to make AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). We also want to make AI goods, like OpenAI’s products, available to everyone on Quora.
OpenAI still has a “big customer” in Quora, and D’Angelo thinks the two companies will work together more than compete with each other.
As a customer, “we spend a lot of money with OpenAI because OpenAI is where Poe gets most of its models,” he said.
D’Angelo said that Quora pays “tens of millions” to Poe writers and companies whose models are used on the site, but he didn’t say how these payments compare to what OpenAI got.
It doesn’t have any deals to license data with any of the big companies right now, and D’Angelo told that the company has no plans to build its own model either.
“We’re not in a hurry to give you our data.” We want to protect our rights and the rights of other people. At this point, it’s not very clear how all of this (the AI environment) will work out. He said, “Right now we are just waiting before we do anything in this direction.”
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The company has also just raised a lot of money, so it is focusing on putting AI into every part of the business and making its current products make more money. He said that Quora will become public “at some point,” but that’s not what we’re talking about now.
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