Today, I'm going to unpack a16z's research report "Investing in Quora and Poe".
A new trend in the AI era
With the release of ChatGPT, the development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and interest in it has increased dramatically. Silicon Valley insiders, early adopters, and tech enthusiasts are joining Discord servers, signing up for betas, and actively looking for ways to access the latest AI technology.
While there is excitement in the tech community about the proliferation of models, GPU efficiency, and open-source and fine-tuned smaller professional models, these changes seem prohibitive to the average consumer. There are many models on the market today and complex user interfaces, which complicates the adoption of AI-native tools.
In order for AI to transition to more than 5 billion internet users around the world and become more intuitive and accessible, multiple models need to be developed to address different patterns and use cases.
Investing in Quora and Poe: Building the Future of AI
a16z has invested in Quora and the Poe it created. Unlike other AI companies that focus on building the best models, Poe has a dual mission:
Provide consumers with the best way to interact with multiple AI products in the same workflow;
Provide developers with the easiest way to build multimodal AI products and reach the masses, whether it's by guiding an existing model to create a bot or training a model on its own.
To achieve this, Poe has created a compelling aggregation layer for text and image AI models, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, GPT-4, and DALL-E 3, Anthropic's Claude Instant and Claude 2, Mistral, StableDiffusionXL, Google's Gemini and PaLM, Meta's Llama 2, and more.
Poe also provides a user interface that makes it easy to discover new AI tools and users to create their favorite toolsets from a variety of models. Why just use one platform and one model, when you can get one that includes all of them by paying $20 per month?
Poe's Creator Tool: Inspire long-tail creativity
The creator tools that Poe is working on, similar to what Roblox has done with games, provide creators with the tools to modify existing models to unleash the creativity of those who want to build AI but don't have the resources to build models on their own. Roblox has created a game engine that provides distribution, trust and safety, infrastructure, and the opportunity for creators to earn a living. This creates a powerful network effect – the more creators build, the more users will use those creations. The more users, the more creators you attract.
Poe's creator tool, while still in its early stages of development, offers benefits similar to Roblox, including a multi-platform infrastructure, discovery mechanisms, and the ability to enable chatbot creators to generate revenue. Poe has shown signs of growing economies of scale and is currently one of the largest generative AI character websites, with creators having built more than 1 million chatbots on the Poe platform. With this latest funding round, Quora plans to further help AI creators and developers monetize their creations.
Poe's unique advantage: Linking to the Quora community
Adam D'Angelo, founder of Quora and Poe, is one of the few founders who has successfully built a consumer internet company with hundreds of millions of monthly active users. Adam's early insights into AI, as well as his deep understanding of AI technology and what the market is missing, are impressive every time I talk to him. Poe is able to tap into Quora's community of more than 400 million users who seek knowledge and expertise, Poe provides them with a logical evolution of information to discover and interact with, gives Poe a unique advantage at the intersection of AI and human expertise, and provides a unique distribution channel.
Adam and his team are moving fast and have already launched apps for iOS, Android, and Windows, with support for multiple languages, threads, PDF summarization, multimodality, and creator monetization, among many other features.
Join hands with Poe to democratize AI
With a16z Growth leading Poe's latest funding round, investors couldn't be more excited about bringing generative AI to the masses. For anyone interested in creating an AI bot and participating in the ecosystem and not yet trying to chat, more information can be found on the Poe official website.
By investing in Quora and Poe, a16z not only sees the potential of a product, but also sees an opportunity to democratize AI technology into the hands of users around the world on a large scale. As technology continues to advance and the community continues to grow, Poe's vision to make AI technology more intuitive and accessible is becoming a reality.
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