The next generation of humans—or robots—may one day look back on this week as a tipping point in how computers and humans interact. On Monday, CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google new chatbot, named Bardbased on its previous disclosure AI bot LaMDA. (It also reported making a invest 400 million USD in the massive language modeling startup Anthropic.) A day later, Microsoft unveils new version of Bing search engine, powered by ChatGPT, the breakout success of OpenAI. In the time it takes to complete a query, artificial intelligence-powered systems have become a vital component of search, the Internet’s most powerful application.
Prepare yourself for endless discussion of the implications. But I fell into that rabbit hole after pondering about a little-announced beta product soft start December of last year and Open to the public one week ago. It’s a chatbot called Poeproduced by, of all companies, Q&A, a 14-year-old social network that helps users find answers to questions by tapping into the knowledge of other users. Like Quora, you type your question and wait for an answer. But Poe, supposedly short for Platform for Open Exploration and unrelated to the macabre’s author, provides its feedback using text generation algorithms like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. No need for humans to think about the question and answer, the answer will come immediately.
This strikes me as an odd pivot for a social network. But when I contacted Adam D’Angelo, Quora’s co-founder and CEO, he pointed out that even while in high school, working on projects with classmate Mark Zuckerberg, he was enthralled. with AI capabilities. “It’s something I’m really excited about,” said D’Angelo, who joined Zuckerberg’s startup Facebook. When he left his CTO position there in 2009 to start Quora, using other people to answer questions was a fallback because the AI wasn’t advanced enough to do so. “Getting the AI to work at the time was really hard,” he said. “But there is a huge untapped potential in connecting people with others over the internet. So instead of worrying about creating this artificial intelligence before it’s ready, why not give everyone access to all the other intelligences out there?”
It turned out to be a pretty good idea. Although Quora never became a giant like Facebook, it had more than 300 million monthly users, D’Angelo said, and by the end of 2021 it was widely reported that before the pandemic, the company had Preparing for IPO with a possible valuation of $4 billion. Although the recent advertising downturn has caused Quora lay off some workers At the end of last month, D’Angelo said the service was getting more inquiries than ever and he hoped the struggling advertising market would recover.
But as a board member of OpenAI, the organization of ChatGPT, he has witnessed first-hand the tremendous advancements of the field and sensed the opportunity. By providing a user interface for many bots, perhaps Quora can simplify access to AI knowledge. Their dialogue responses will appear the same as the human answers provided on Quora itself. So his team secured access to OpenAI’s bot and Anthropic’s chatbot Claude—he won’t share the terms—and built Poe.
Quora’s move tells us a lot about the depth of changes that AI is having in the world today. In case you don’t understand symbolism, let me tell you that: A company whose foundation was built on bringing people together to share knowledge is currently pursuing a new model. where people turn not to each other but to robots to share knowledge. their answers.
