OpenAI went through a difficult period, but D'Angelo may have had even more hardship because his own business, Quora, was making significant strides in the AI space at the same time that the drama was unfolding.

The crowdsourced Q&A website Quora, which D'Angelo co-founded and serves as CEO of, has been developing its own AI platform in addition to raising money, having raised $75 million in a round that PitchBook values at $425 million. The business introduced Poe (short for Platform for Open Exploration) in February 2023. Poe allows users to communicate with and ask questions of a range of chatbots. It also allows developers to create their own bots and provides a marketplace and bot monetization platform that is akin to OpenAI's GPT Store.

Important queries were also being asked about Quora's main Q&A service. With tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity being widely available, incumbent search engines like Google and Bing were starting to use AI to produce more fluid results and answer questions. What could Quora do to ensure that it was one of the top websites where people could get their questions answered? More importantly, is crowdsourced Q&A really needed or wanted anymore?

These are fundamental considerations for D'Angelo, who views AI as a valuable tool that individuals may use to access the collective knowledge of the Internet. Despite his quiet demeanor, he has been a significant player in the tech industry for many years. He and Mark Zuckerberg were friends in high school, and in 2002 they founded Synapse, a digital music recommendation service that, according to this old Harvard Crimson article, outperformed offers from Microsoft and other companies. then, while Facebook was barely getting started, he was appointed CTO. He then co-founded Quora.

It seems that all of it was just a lengthy route to developing AI tools for him. I recently spoke with D'Angelo on the prospects and problems facing AI today, the creation and upkeep of developer communities, and the part that people can play in knowledge sharing and access. Here are some salient points from our discussion:

For present, humans are more adept at answering questions than AI.

Contrary to popular belief, the hunt for knowledge appears to be less affected by the hoopla around artificial intelligence. Despite the widespread usage of AI technologies, D'Angelo said that Quora is witnessing record levels of users; however, he failed to provide an update on the 400 million monthly active users that the company had revealed in July of last year.

However, there is a connection between D'Angelo's interest in AI and the goals that Quora set out to achieve. Recently, D'Angelo said that he was lured to social networking because he was really interested in artificial intelligence (AI) in a talk with David George, a general partner at a16z. Though it was difficult to develop at the time, he saw social networks as an alternate architecture that could accomplish the same goal: in his view, individuals gathered in a social network almost played the role of living, large information models since they could share information with one another, including news and entertainment.

He developed the idea while working at Facebook, and he went on to start Quora in order to condense the potential use of social networks as question-answering platforms. AI is now assuming that position.

"In the past, AI was used to offer responses; people were used instead. On Quora, users may respond to inquiries such as "What is the capital of California?" You may now obtain that response by using AI techniques, he stated.

However, AI—at least not in its current form—is unable to address every query that a person could have. D'Angelo thinks it does a lot to help individuals hold onto their value.

The foundation of Quora has always been the belief that people possess a wealth of information that is not available online and is instead stored in their minds. D'Angelo added, "And AI won't have access to any of that knowledge."

Even if newer, more sophisticated models are gradually making headway in addressing the hallucination problem, he admitted that AI still has this problem, making it difficult to depend on such results.

assisting Poe developers

Poe was made available to all users by Quora last year, following a few months of restricted beta testing. The business has since included facilities for creating and perusing the bots on its marketplace.

The argument from the startup is that users have access to all of the many models and bots available on the site. The potential to reach millions of consumers without worrying about distribution across platforms is what draws developers in. Moreover, Poe developers have two options for making money: The first is when a user signs up for a Poe premium subscription through their bot; the second is when they establish a per-message fee, which allows them to get paid according to the frequency with which users interact with their bot.

Poe essentially provides users and developers with access to several huge language models, but its features are comparable to those of OpenAI's GPT Store and ChatGPT.

That being said, some of the difficulties faced by both systems are similar. With prompts, they make it simple for everyone to construct bots, which makes it difficult for developers to differentiate themselves. According to D'Angelo, there are currently one million bots on the platform, while ChatGPT has three million bespoke GPTs. To put things in perspective, it took Apple's App Store almost five years to reach the million-app milestone.

Poe and GPT Store also see a great deal of spam, bots with identical names, bots that pretend to be free of plagiarism, and even bots that toy with copyright laws. Additionally, Poe has introduced a feature that allows users to have several bot conversations. It's challenging to select a bot that will perform the task properly with all that noise.

Notwithstanding these obstacles, D'Angelo claims that Quora hopes to enhance bot detection in order to assist developers in making steady income.

"Making a living [from creating AI bots] and covering their operating costs is one of our goals with developers," he stated. "The pay-per-message option is a significant advancement, but we also want to assist developers in gaining as much dissemination inside the network as we can. Thus, in order to increase the number of individuals who are aware of the bots, we are enhancing our recommendation system.

Not currently any Poe advertisements

Even with its steady growth, Poe is still much smaller than ChatGPT. According to market research firm SimilarWeb, Poe has 3.1 million monthly active users globally (Android alone) and 4 million monthly active users in the United States (iOS and Android). This is in contrast to the 100 million users each week on average that ChatGPT now has.

According to D'Angelo, the business would not run advertisements and will instead rely on Poe's $19.99 monthly membership service to make money. This is not the case for all AI-powered solutions available on the market; Bing Search, Perplexity, and Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) all include advertisements.

Quora and D'Angelo declined to provide income estimates; nevertheless, since Poe's inception, users have spent $7.3 million for memberships, equating to over 40,000 paid users, according to data from analytics company Sensor Tower. By contrast, Sensor Tower reports that ChatGPT has over a million paying users.

Additional Quora and Poe AI tools

Even though Quora emphasizes the value of human responses, it has already begun testing responses from Poe. If you have any further questions, you can talk with Poe via the link provided on the website that answers some of the questions in an AI-written format.

According to D'Angelo, Quora has already put in place mechanisms to rank various human responses. These days, it uses methods like surveying people to find out if an AI-generated response is helpful.

"I want the AI-written responses to be fairly ranked and to only rank higher than a human response if the AI-written response is more beneficial than the human response," he stated.

Additionally, D'Angelo wants to prevent Quora from being called a "answer engine."

We never really thought about Quora as an answer engine, in my opinion. That phrase suggests that there are solutions that are exclusive to AI. Quora is primarily about human knowledge, which artificial intelligence will augment, he stated.

Additionally, Quora is developing AI tools that users may use to compose responses, with plans to make them available soon. According to D'Angelo, one of the tools it is evaluating enables users to produce a picture based on the responses they provide.

The business also employs AI in a few additional capacities. One entails attempting to identify bots or individuals who respond to Quora queries automatically. D'Angelo said that the corporation will alert anybody who attempt to manipulate the system, but he did not disclose any specifics about the initiative.

The quality of answers on Quora has drastically decreased, as several sites and individuals have lately noted. In response, D'Angelo stated that because poor quality responses are more visible, individuals believe that the overall caliber of replies has dropped. According to him, AI is assisting the business in differentiating between various response quality levels, and the preliminary findings are encouraging.

Regarding Quora's association with OpenAI

"I just can't talk about any of this stuff," D'Angelo remarked, declining to address any of the turmoil surrounding OpenAI. "This is not my place to speak for OpenAI. All I can do is speak for Quora. However, he did state that OpenAI is not a rival to him because the larger firm has, well, broader goals.

In terms of what users can accomplish on Poe and the GPT Store, there is some overlap. However, that is insignificant in the overall context. The goal of OpenAI is to develop AGI, or artificial general intelligence. Additionally, our goal at Quora is to make AI products, including those of OpenAI, accessible to everyone.

Additionally, Quora is still a "big customer" of OpenAI, and D'Angelo anticipates more cooperation from the business than rivalry.

"As a customer, we spend a lot of money with OpenAI because it's Poe's largest source of models," he continued.

D'Angelo acknowledged that Quora pays firms whose models the platform utilizes and developers on Poe "tens of millions," but he did not specifically state how these payments relate to the amount paid to OpenAI.

According to D'Angelo, TechCrunch, Quora does not presently have any agreements in place for data licensing with any of the large corporations, nor is it considering developing its own approach.

"We are not pushing for a data license right now. Our goal is to ensure that the rights of both users and ourselves are upheld. How all of this (the AI landscape) will work out is still somewhat unclear. Therefore, we are basically waiting at this time before moving further," D'Angelo stated.

The company is concentrated on integrating AI throughout the organization and enhancing revenue growth on its current products because it recently concluded its most recent fundraising round. Quora will go public "at some point," he added, but for now, it is not the main priority.