Inside Quora’s Quest For Relevance Using AI

Forbes

Nearly 15 years after founding Quora, D’Angelo wants to reinvent the question-and answer company around AI with its second product ever, Poe—before it goes the way of Yahoo Answers.  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2024/05/20/quora-adam-dangelo-poe/?sh=25d330133343  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00 Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Thursday, May 23rd.

00:05 Today on Forbes, Inside Quora's Quest for Relevance.

00:10 Why CEO Adam D'Angelo has gone all-in on AI

00:15 Adam D'Angelo, the CEO of Quora, is extolling the virtues of Poe.

00:20 That's spelled P-O-E.

00:22 And it's the company's platform for letting people chat with multiple AI models at a time.

00:28 Last year, D'Angelo said at an AI event that most of the company's energy these days is devoted to Poe.

00:34 The company launched the service last year, and it serves as an interface for using and comparing multiple AI models,

00:40 as well as bots built on top of them.

00:43 That means less energy on Quora, the nearly 15-year-old Q&A forum that D'Angelo founded after leaving his post as Facebook's CTO.

00:52 But D'Angelo is so excited about AI's potential that he's gotten hands-on with the company's new product,

00:58 which has its own URL, separate from Quora.

01:02 D'Angelo told Forbes, quote, "Poe needs more of my attention because it's in this more rapidly changing landscape.

01:08 Quora has been around for many years now. It doesn't need to adapt. It doesn't need to change every week."

01:14 He added that Quora's goals are quarterly, whereas Poe's targets are set every two weeks.

01:20 The two products are vastly different.

01:22 Quora is a message board where people answer questions like, "What did Marilyn Monroe carry in her coffin?"

01:28 and "What is the best small business to start in Gambia?"

01:32 Meanwhile, Poe, which stands for Platform for Open Exploration,

01:36 is a freemium $200-per-year subscription service that gives people access to several models,

01:42 including OpenAI's GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini.

01:48 In the service, users can sample multiple models at once, comparing how each one tackles the same prompt.

01:54 Developers can build bots on top of those models, creating, for example,

01:58 an AI focused specifically on travel booking or creating coloring books for schoolchildren.

02:04 Those developers can get paid per query, adding another revenue stream for people building AI tools.

02:10 D'Angelo likens Poe to a web browser for AI,

02:14 making the tech more accessible, like Netscape did three decades earlier.

02:19 On its face, Poe and Quora don't seem connected.

02:22 But D'Angelo says Poe was born out of AI experiments the company began running two years ago,

02:27 where it used OpenAI's GPT-3 to generate answers for Quora questions.

02:32 They were not as good as human-written answers,

02:35 but the company found that there was a sweet spot for AI-generated answers,

02:39 replies to niche questions that no human had ever written an answer for.

02:43 "Getting a lower-quality AI answer was better than waiting around for a human to answer your question," he concluded.

02:50 D'Angelo realized that the experience resembled something more like private chat than an open forum,

02:55 so the company set out to build that kind of service.

02:59 D'Angelo's rallying of the company around Poe comes at a confounding time for Quora.

03:04 Founded in 2010, it has become a venerable throwback to the late Web 2.0 era,

03:09 surviving where rivals like Yahoo Answers fizzled out.

03:13 But it hasn't evolved into the modern era compared to competitors like Reddit,

03:17 which went public in March and long ago became a cultural hub of the Internet.

03:22 That raises an interesting question.

03:24 Who still uses Quora, really?

03:26 It's hard to say, but the anecdotal evidence isn't great.

03:30 Earlier this year, Slate proclaimed Quora dead,

03:33 and on Quora itself, the question "Is Quora dead?"

03:36 has been asked many times dating back to at least 2017,

03:40 as one respondent answered, "Maybe Quora has just run its course, sort of like Yahoo or MySpace."

03:48 D'Angelo declined to comment on Quora's revenue,

03:51 though the company says it gets 400 million users a month.

03:54 With Poe, a seemingly disparate product from Quora,

03:58 the company's trajectory has gotten more murky.

04:01 Is it a social forum backed by an advertising business model along the lines of Reddit,

04:05 or is it going to become a player in AI?

04:08 D'Angelo says it's now poised for the latter.

04:11 In January, the company announced $75 million in funding from Andreesen Horowitz to build out Poe.

04:18 For full coverage, check out Richard Nieves' piece on Forbes.com.

04:24 This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.

04:28 [music]

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