Organize | Gongcheng
采访 | Ivan Mehta
Produced by | 51CTO Technology Stack (WeChat ID: blog51cto)
When it comes to the protagonist of today's interview, Adam D'Angelo, everyone will definitely think of him as the CEO of the American version of Zhihu Quora, but in fact, he has another special identity: the only person who has retained his seat on OpenAI's board after one of the biggest controversies in the tech industry last November, the firing and rehiring of Sam Altman, and the reorganization of the board of directors.
It's undoubtedly a tough time for OpenAI, but it could be even more so for D'Angelo, because while the play is playing out, his own company, Quora, is taking a big step toward AI.
Quora, a crowdsourced Q&A site co-founded and CEO by D'Angelo, has been building its own AI platform while also raising money (according to PitchBook, the round was $75 million and valued at $425 million).
The company launched Poe (Platform for Open Exploration), a large model integration platform in February 2023, which allows users to ask questions and talk to a variety of mainstream chatbots, lets developers build their own bots, and offers a bot monetization program similar to OpenAI's GPT store and marketplace (which allows creators to set a price per message for their bots, and as long as users send them a message, they can earn money.) ）
Obviously, there are a lot of big problems with Quora's commercial model. First, existing search engines like Google and Bing are starting to use artificial intelligence to generate smoother results and answer questions; Second, with the widespread use of tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, what "tricks" does Quora have to secure itself as one of the top Q&A sites? More importantly, does anyone really want or need crowdsourced Q&A?
For D'Angelo, these problems are naturally faced by anyone who pursues AI, and he believes that AI is an important tool that people can use to tap into the collective knowledge of the Internet. He has been a key figure in the tech world for years, and although he has kept a low profile, he has long been committed to developing an Internet knowledge base — he was friends with Mark Zuckerberg in high school, and the two founded Synapse, a digital music advice service in 2002, which reportedly rejected takeover offers from Microsoft and other companies for a period of "blackmail" (one of the terms of which was that the other party would contribute $950,000 and wanted Xiaozha and D'Angelo to work for the company for three years). Later, he served as CTO at Facebook when it was just starting out, and eventually co-founded Quora.
All of this seems like a long road to building AI tools for him. In a recent interview, D'Angelo was asked about many aspects of today's AI landscape: the challenges and opportunities of enterprise AI, how to build and support developer communities, and what role humans can play in sharing and accessing knowledge.
Here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
1. Humans themselves are acting as information models, and AI is taking over
The hype around AI doesn't seem to have as much of an impact on information search as you might think. D'Angelo said that despite the proliferation of AI tools, Quora still has a record number of users, though he declined to update the data on 400 million monthly active users disclosed in July last year.
Still, there is a bridge between Quora's original intentions and D'Angelo's interest in artificial intelligence. Recently, in a conversation with David George, general partner at a16z, D'Angelo stated that he was attracted to social networks because he was actually interested in artificial intelligence. The latter was difficult to develop at the time, but he saw social networks as an alternative architecture for the realization of the same idea: in his opinion, the people gathered in social networks almost played the role of living large information models, since they could provide each other with news, entertainment, etc.
He researched the concept while working at Facebook and later founded Quora to distill the role social networks can play in answering questions. Now, AI is taking over that role.
In the past, people could ask questions like, "Where is the capital of California?" "Humans will answer this question on Quora. Now, you can use AI tools to get answers. He said.
But artificial intelligence, at least in its current form, cannot answer all the questions one might ask. D'Angelo believes that this can help people retain a lot of value.
"Quora has always been built on the idea that the human mind has a vast amount of knowledge that is not found on the internet. AI won't be able to acquire any of this knowledge," D'Angelo said.
He acknowledges that AI still has the illusion problem, which makes it difficult to rely on such answers, even if newer, more advanced models are still faltering in solving the problem.
2. Real money supports Poe developers
After several months of closed beta, Quora opened Poe to all users last year. Since then, the company has launched tools to create and browse bots on its marketplace.
The company's advertisement is that consumers have access to all the different types of models or bots on the platform. For developers, the attraction is being able to reach millions of users without having to worry about cross-platform distribution. There are two ways for developers to earn money on Poe: the first is through referrals, when users become Poe premium subscribers through their bots; The second is to set a rate per message so they can get paid based on how often people use the bot.
Essentially, Poe provides developers and users with access to different large language models, but its functionality is similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT Store.
But this means that both platforms face some of the same challenges. They make it easy for anyone to create bots with prompts, which makes it difficult for developers to stand out. D'Angelo told me that there are already 1 million bots on the platform and 3 million custom GPTs on ChatGPT. For reference, it took more than five years for the Apple App Store to break the million app mark.
Poe and GPT Store also suffer from a lot of spam, bots with similar names, bots that claim to bypass plagiarism, and even bots that violate copyright laws. Poe has also released a feature that allows users to chat with multiple bots in a single conversation. All this noise makes it difficult for us to choose a robot that will do the job well.
Despite these challenges, D'Angelo says Quora wants to help developers earn sustainable money by improving "bot discovery."
"One of our goals with developers is to be able to make a living [by making AI robots] and cover their operating costs," he said. "We've taken a big step forward with pay-per-message functionality, but we also want to help developers distribute as much as possible within the platform. As a result, we are working to improve our recommender system so that more people can learn about these bots. ”
3. There are no ads on Poe yet
Poe is growing steadily, but it's still a lot smaller than ChatGPT. Poe has 4 million monthly active users (iOS and Android) in the U.S. and 3.1 million monthly active users worldwide (Android only), according to market intelligence firm Sameweb. In comparison, ChatGPT now has an average of 100 million weekly users.
D'Angelo said the company will stay away from advertising and instead rely on Poe's $19.99 per month subscription product to generate revenue. This is in stark contrast to some of the other AI tools on the market: Perplexity, Bing Search, and Google's Search Generation Experience (SGE) all feature ads.
Quora and D'Angelo declined to disclose revenue figures, but data from analytics firm Sensor Tower shows that Poe users have spent $7.3 million on subscriptions and nearly 40,000 paying users since launch. In comparison, ChatGPT has more than 1 million paying users, according to Sensor Tower.
4. Let AI answers be ranked fairly
Although Quora emphasizes the importance of human answers, it has begun to experiment with the answers written by Poe. The website provides AI-written answers to some of the questions with a link to chat with Poe if you have any further questions.
截图来源：TechCrunch
D'Angelo said Quora has deployed systems to score different human answers. Now, it is applying techniques such as asking users through surveys "whether AI-generated answers are useful".
"My goal is for AI-written answers to be ranked fairly and only higher than human answers if they are more useful than human answers," he said.
D'Angelo also wants to avoid Quora being labeled an "answer engine."
"I don't think we really looked at Quora as an answer engine. This term somewhat implies that there is an AI-only answer. Quora is really about human knowledge, and we're going to let AI augment it," he said.
Quora is also working on developing AI tools that users can use to write answers, and hopes to release it soon. D'Angelo notes that one of the tools it is testing allows users to generate images based on their answers.
The company also uses artificial intelligence in a few other ways. One of them involves trying to capture bots or users who answer Quora questions using automated techniques. D'Angelo did not disclose details about the project, saying that the company will issue a warning to the perpetrators who try to use the system to play the game.
Recently, some media outlets and users have pointed out that the quality of answers on Quora has dropped significantly. In response, D'Angelo said that people feel that the overall standard of answers has decreased because low-quality answers are easier to see. He said AI is helping companies identify differences between different quality answers, and early results look promising.
5. About Quora's relationship with OpenAI
D'Angelo declined to discuss any OpenAI incidents — "I can't talk about these things," he said. "I'm not here to represent OpenAI. I can only speak for Quora. But he did say that he doesn't see OpenAI as a competitor because larger startups have bigger ambitions.
"There's a sense of overlap between what a user can do on the GPT store and what they can do on Poe. But this is secondary in the grand plan. OpenAI is working hard to achieve its major mission of building AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). At Quora, we want to make AI products available to the world – including OpenAI's products. ”
Quora remains OpenAI's "big customer," and D'Angelo expects to work more with the company than compete.
"As an OpenAI customer, we spend a lot of money because OpenAI is Poe's largest source of models," he added.
While D'Angelo did mention that Quora paid "tens of millions" of dollars to developers on Poe and to companies where the platform uses its models, he didn't explicitly elaborate on how those payments compare to OpenAI's.
D'Angelo said Quora does not currently have any data licensing agreements with any major companies and is not considering building its own model.
"We are not in a hurry to obtain data permission. We want to make sure that our rights and the rights of our users are respected. At the moment, it is not very clear how all this (in the field of artificial intelligence) will develop. So now, we're just waiting before we do anything in that direction," D'Angelo said.
The company has only been raising money less than 4 months since its last funding, so it is focused on building AI across the business and improving revenue growth for existing products. He stated that Quora would be available "at some point," but that's not the focus at the moment.
Source: 51CTO Technology Stack