Last November, Adam DiAngelo found himself at the epicenter of the tech industry's biggest controversy. The board of OpenAI, the $80 billion startup driving the AI boom, abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman, only to reinstate him days later. D'Angelo was a member of the board that fired Altman…and he was (and remains) a member of the board that reinstated him. In fact, he was the only person to retain his seat during the subsequent restructuring that saw many of the original members leave the board.
It was certainly a difficult time for OpenAI, but perhaps doubly so for D'Angelo. Because the drama was unfolding while his company, Quora, was taking big steps toward his AI.
Crowdsourcing Q&A site Quora, of which D'Angelo is co-founder and CEO, was building its own AI platform while raising capital (according to PitchBook, it raised $425 million in a $75 million round). valued at USD). The company launched Poe (short for Platform for Open Exploration) in February 2023. It allows users to ask questions and talk to a variety of chatbots, allows developers to build their own bots, and offers a bot monetization program and marketplace similar to OpenAI's GPT. shop.
Quora's core Q&A service also faced some big questions. Existing search engines like Google and Bing were beginning to use AI to generate more fluid results and answer questions. With tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity now widely available, what can Quora do to ensure its position as one of the top websites people visit? Were their questions answered? More importantly, does anyone actually want or need crowdsourced Q&A anymore?
For D'Angelo, these questions are essential to the pursuit of AI, which he sees as an important tool that people can use to leverage the collective knowledge of the internet. A modest but important figure in the technology world for years, he has long been involved in efforts to harness the Internet's wealth of knowledge. He was friends with Mark Zuckerberg in high school, and according to this vintage Harvard Crimson article in 2002, the two of them built a digital music suggestion service called Synapse that attracted acquisition offers from Microsoft and others. It is said that he broke it. He then became CTO when Facebook was just starting out, and eventually he co-founded Quora.
It has been a seemingly long journey for him to build an AI tool. I recently spoke with D'Angelo about his AI challenges and opportunities today, how to build and support developer communities, and the role humans can play when it comes to knowledge sharing and access. Here are some highlights from our conversation.
Right now, humans are better at answers than AI
The hype around AI seems to have less of an impact on information search than we thought. D'Angelo said Quora is seeing record user numbers despite the proliferation of AI tools, but it beats the 400 million monthly active users figure Quora disclosed last July. I refused to do so.
Still, there is a bridge between what Quora was trying to do and D'Angelo's interest in AI. In a recent conversation with his David George, general partner at a16z, D'Angelo said he was drawn to social networking because he was actually interested in AI. Although the latter was difficult to develop at the time, he saw social networks as an alternative architecture for realizing the same idea. In his view, people gathered in social networks almost acted as living, large-scale information models. We will be able to provide each other with news, entertainment, and more.
He worked on the concept while at Facebook and later founded Quora to distill the role social networks can play in answering questions. Now, AI is taking over that role.
“Previously, humans provided answers instead of AI. You can ask questions like, 'What is the capital of California?' And humans will answer it on Quora. Now we can use AI tools to get that answer,” he said.
But AI, at least in its current form, cannot provide answers to every question people have. D'Angelo believes that it helps people hold on to many values.
“Quora has always been founded on the idea that humans have a lot of knowledge that we can access in our heads that is not available anywhere else on the internet, and that AI will no longer have access to that knowledge,” said Di. Angelo said.
He acknowledged that AI still has the problem of illusions and that it is difficult to rely on such answers, even as newer, more advanced models are making incremental progress in tackling the problem. .
Developer support in Poe
Quora rolled out Poe to all users last year after several months of closed beta testing. Since then, the company has introduced tools for creating and viewing bots in its marketplace.
The company's pitch is to allow consumers to use all different types of models and bots on its platform. The appeal for developers is the potential to reach millions of users without worrying about distribution across platforms. And a developer can make money with Poe in two ways. The first is through referrals when users become his Poe Premium subscribers via bots. The second is a way to get paid based on how often people use your bot by setting a per-message price.
Essentially, Poe provides developers and users with access to a variety of large-scale language models, but its functionality is similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT store.
But that means both platforms face some of the same challenges. These make it easier for anyone to create bots with prompts, but they also make it harder for developers to stand out. D'Angelo said he already has 1 million bots on the platform, compared to his 3 million custom GPTs on ChatGPT. For reference, it took Apple's App Store over 5 years to reach over 1 million apps.
Both Poe and the GPT Store are plagued by a large amount of spam, including bots with similar names, bots that claim to be immune from plagiarism, and even bots that ignore copyright laws. Poe also released a feature that allows users to chat. Multiple bots in one conversation. Such noise makes it difficult to choose a bot that will perform well.
Despite these challenges, D'Angelo said Quora wants to help developers earn sustainable revenue by improving bot discovery.
“One of our goals for developers is to be able to make a living. [out of making AI bots] and cover operating costs,” he said. “While we have made great strides with our pay-per-messaging capabilities, we also want to help developers distribute within our platform as much as possible. We are working on improving our recommendation system.”
Poe has no ads yet
Although Poe is steadily growing, it is still much smaller than ChatGPT. Market intelligence firm SimilarWeb suggests that Poe has 4 million monthly active users in the US (iOS and Android) and 3.1 million monthly active users worldwide (Android only). Compare this to ChatGPT users, which currently averages 100 million users per week.
D'Angelo said the company will move away from advertising and instead rely on Poe's $19.99 per month subscription product to generate revenue. This is in contrast to some of the other AI-powered tools on the market. Perplexity, Bing Search, and Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) all contain ads.
Quora and D'Angelo declined to disclose revenue numbers, but Poe users have spent $7.3 million on subscriptions since the service launched, with nearly 40,000 paying users, according to data from analytics firm Sensor Tower. climb. In contrast, ChatGPT has over 1 million paid subscribers, according to Sensor Tower.
Other AI tools for Quora and Poe
Despite stating the importance of human answers, Quora is already experimenting with answers written by Poe. The site displays AI-written answers to some questions, with a link to chat with Poe if you have further questions.
Quora has started experimenting with AI-powered answers for some questions Image credit: Screenshot by TechCrunch
D'Angelo said Quora already has a system in place to rate different human answers. We are now applying techniques such as asking users through surveys whether they find AI-generated answers helpful.
“My goal is for AI-written answers to be ranked fairly and only to outrank human answers when they are more useful than human answers,” he said.
D'Angelo also wants to avoid Quora being tagged as an “answer engine.”
“I don’t think we really looked at Quora as an answer engine. The term implies that there are only AI answers. Quora is really about human knowledge, and we want AI to do that. We are going to have it strengthened,” he said.
Quora is also working on an AI tool that users can use to write answers, which they hope to release soon. D'Angelo noted that one of his tools being tested allows users to generate images based on their answers.
The company also uses AI in several other ways. One is to try to catch a bot or user answering his questions on Quora using automation. D'Angelo did not provide details about the project, but said the company would warn perpetrators who try to exploit the system.
Recently, several media outlets and users have noted that the quality of answers on Quora has plummeted. In response, D'Angelo said people feel that the overall standard of answers is declining because lower-quality answers get more attention. He said AI is helping the company determine differences in the quality of answers, and early results look promising.
About the relationship between Quora and OpenAI
D'Angelo declined to address any of the OpenAI drama, saying, “I can't say anything about this.” “I'm not here to represent OpenAI. I just represent Quora.” But he doesn't see OpenAI as a competitor, because bigger startups have bigger ambitions. He also said that it is because he has .
“There's some overlap between what users can do in the GPT store and what they can do in Poe. But that's minor in the grand scheme of things. OpenAI is committed to this big mission of building AGI. Masu. [Artificial General Intelligence]. And at Quora, we want to make our AI products, including those from OpenAI, available to the world. ”
Quora remains a “big customer” of OpenAI, and D'Angelo expects to work more with the company than with its competitors.
“OpenAI is the largest source of models for Poe, so we spend a lot of money as an OpenAI customer,” he added.
D'Angelo noted that Quora pays “tens of millions of dollars” to Poe developers and companies whose model the platform uses, but how do these payments compare to payments to OpenAI? It was not explicitly stated.
Quora doesn't currently have data licensing agreements with any major companies, nor is it considering building its own model, D'Angelo told TechCrunch.
“We are not in a hurry to license data. We want to make sure that our rights and the rights of our users are respected. At the moment, all of this (the state of AI ) is not very clear how it will play out. So at this point we are just waiting before taking any steps in this direction,” D'Angelo said.
The company is relatively new since its last round of funding, and is focused on building AI across its business and improving revenue growth for its existing products. He said Quora plans to go public “at some point,” but that's not the focus right now.