Exploring Poe: Company Profile and Statistical Insights of the Quora Chatbot

Poe is a generative AI chatbot owned by internet giant Quora. It was first announced in December 2022. The official public launch date was two months later, in February 2023. 

Following the public launch, it took Quora a little over a month to make Poe available for desktop, in March 2023. 

(Source, Source, and Source)

What Is Poe and How Does It Work?

Poe is a multilingual platform featuring chatbots. Similar to other large language models (LLMs), it’s accessible through a graphic interface resembling a chat. (Source and Source)

Poe allows people to ask questions and provides them with answers based on other LLM constructs, such as:

• GPT-4o
• Claude 3
• Models from the Llama series
• Google’s Gemini
• Stable Diffusion

(Source)

After registering, you can start a chat with Quroa’s Poe bot. Alternatively, you can specify another LLM construct from the “Your bots” menu. (Source)

Beyond providing users the option to chat with a chatbot, Poe also provides a platform where users (both businesses and individuals) can build a bot, as noted in the Poe Creator Guide. (Source)

Who Owns Poe?

• Poe AI is a part of Quora.com — Adam D’Angelo is a co-founder and CEO of Quora. (Source)

• Poe was announced in December 2022 by the Quora team but became publicly available two months later, in February 2023. (Source)

• Quora is headquartered in Mountain View, California. (Source)

An Overview of Quora

Considering that Quora is Poe’s official parent company, let’s take a look at some of Quora’s statistical insights:

• Quora (also known as Alma Networks) was founded on June 1, 2009. The company is a for-profit organization that offers Q&A services on the Internet. (Source)

• The founders of Quora are Adam D’Angelo (co-founder & CEO) and Charlie Cheever (co-founder & advisor) (Source and Source)

• Quora’s headquarters are established in Mountain View, California, United States. The company currently has between 251 and 500 employees. (Source)
• Its headquarters regions are noted as San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and the West Coast. (Source)

• Quora functions in the Q&A, copywriting, information services, internet, and product design industries. (Source)

• Quora currently has 1 acquisition, 42 total products (being actively used in the company), and 66 active technologies (currently in use), according to a Crunchbase overview from October 2024. (Source)

• The platform averages nearly 1.2 billion visits every month and has an average of 0.31% monthly visit growth. (Source)
• As of 2017, Quora had a valuation of 1.8 billion. (Source)

Quora’s Financial Outlook

Let’s review Quora’s financial outlook, including the company’s investors, funding rounds, and acquisitions.

• Quora has had a total of 5 funding rounds to date, and the total funding amount is $301M. (Source)

• There are 7 lead investors out of a total of 16 investors, and the latest funding round took place on January 10, 2024. (Source)

• Some of Quora’s more notable investors are Andreessen Horowitz, the Collaborative Fund, Matrix, Dustin Moskovitz, and Tiger Global Management. (Source)

• Quora has a single acquisition. It acquired Parlio on March 30, 2016. (Source)

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• The last funding round for Quora took place in January 2024 and finalized a $75M investment. (Source)
• Prior to the most recent January 2024 funding round, the previous Series D funding round of $85M was accompanied by an announcement of a $1.8 billion valuation for Quora. (Source)

How to Use Quora’s Poe AI Chat

There are a few simple steps to gain access to Quora’s Poe AI chatbot:

1. Access the platform and register

Navigate to the official website of Poe (Poe.com) through your desktop computer or through the application available on iOS and Android. Click “Sign in With Google” or conduct a manual email registration to gain access. Input the required application to access the interface. (Source)

2. Navigate Poe’s interface

Take a moment to get used to the interface and the platform’s layout. The interface features a “Your bots” section where you can view all of the bots available to you, as well as a “Profile” and “Settings” tab. (Source)

3. Select your chatbot and start prompting

Specify the language model you wish to use in your conversations and type your first prompt in the “Start a new chat” field. After engaging in one more conversation, you can manage all your existing chats via the accessible menu bar. (Source)

Which Chatbots Does Poe AI Integrate With?

Quora’s Poe offers a unique feature known as Multi-bot chat. Multi-bot chat enables users to access multiple bots and even compare answers with a single click. 

There are a number of bots available in Poe’s Multi-bot chat, including:

• Claude 3 Opus
• GPT-4
• Mistral Large
• Gemini 1.5 Pro
• DALL-E 3

(Source)

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Let’s take a closer look at some of the models that you can access via Poe.

Assistant and Web-Search

Assistant and Web-Search are two of the top bots you can access via Poe.

• Assistant is described as a “General-purpose assistant bot. For queries requiring up-to-date information, it can access real-time data from the web for more accurate answers.”
• Web-Search is described as a “Web-enabled assistant bot that searches the internet to inform its responses. Particularly good for queries regarding up-to-date information or specific facts. Powered by GPT 4o Mini.”

(Sources: Assitant and Web-Search)

GPT models

Poe also provides access to OpenAI’s models, including GPT-4o and o1 mini.

• OpenAI’s GPT-4o is noted on Poe as “OpenAI’s most powerful model,” and highlights that its capabilities are stronger than GPT-3.5, particularly for math and physics queries.
• OpenAI’s o1 mini is described as a faster and more efficient version of o1, which is excellent for “coding, math, and science.”

(Sourced via Poe)

Llama models

Among the top models Poe provides are Llama-3.1-405B and Llama-3.1-70B.

• Llama-3.1-405B is highlighted for its exceptional linguistic capabilities for multilingual dialogue.
• Llama-3.1-70B is noted as offering a fantastic balance of intelligence and speed, with strong multilanguage capabilities.

(Sourced via Poe)

Gemini models

Gemini models are also available through Poe, including Gemini-1.5-Pro and Gemini-1.5-Flash: 

• Gemini-1.5-Pro is described as providing a superb balance between speed and performance, which also accepts a variety of inputs including text, image, and video.
• Gemini-1.5-Flash is noted as a smaller yet highly efficient model designed to offer the best response times.

(Sourced via Poe)

Claude models

Anthropic’s Claude language models are also integrated with Poe and accessible through its interface, such as Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Claude-3-Sonnet:

• Claude-3.5-Sonnet is highlighted as the most powerful model available from Anthropic, which offers complex coding, analysis, and visual processing capabilities.
• Claude-3-Sonnet is described as being excellent for intelligence and speed via a shorter context window.

(Sourced via Poe)

These are just a few of the many bots available in Poe’s inventory, in addition to these Poe also offers popular image-generating models such as OpenAI-s DALL-E and StableDiffusionXL.

What’s the Difference Between Bots on Poe?

The bots available on Poe AI are categorized for user intent, providing a convenient way to access bots designed for particular purposes (think popular vs. programming vs. image generation bots).

Some of the bot categories available via Poe include:

• Official, popular, featured, and new bots: These bots are selected based on performance and popularity.

• Image generation bots: Search for bots with specific image creation capabilities, such as StableDiffusionXL and DALL-E.
• Programming bots: Browse through a rich selection of programming-purposed bots, such as all versions of Meta’s Code-Llama-34B, o1-mini, and o1-preview.

With a number of varying categories, Poe offers a fantastic selection for a variety of use cases.

(Sourced via Poe)

How to Create a Bot With Poe

Being able to effortlessly design and create your own bot is what placed Poe in the spotlight.

The platform allows users to create a bot that’s either a ‘prompt bot’ or a ‘server bot.’ After building the bot, you can share it with the community or other users of Poe AI.

• Creating a prompt bot: Designing a prompt bot is a convenient option as it doesn’t require coding. Instead of writing code, you can provide natural language instructions.
  • Poe notes that when creating a prompt bot, you can design it to process text, image, or video prompts. (Source) 
• Creating a server bot: The second method is to make a server bot. Server bots are more technical and require coding as you’ll need to develop a ‘custom backend’ that is capable of running the code you’ve provided to answer users.

(Sourced via Poe)

Step-by-step guide to creating a Prompt Bot with Poe

1. Access the “Create Bot” page

Once you’re registered and signed in, click the “Create Bot” button in the upper-left corner (if you’re on the browser version). 

For application users, tap the three horizontal lines icon and select “Create Bot” from the drop-down menu. If prompted to finalize your registration, provide the necessary credentials and keep moving forward with the instructions. (Source)

2. Customize your Bot’s appearance

During the first steps of the bot’s creation, you will be prompted to provide or upload a picture (optional) for the bot and assign a custom name. 

By default, the bot’s name field will populate with a pre-generated name. You can keep the default or update it later after the creation is complete. 

Although optional, you’ll also be prompted to fill out a description for your bot and define its characteristics. (Source)

3. Adjust your Bot’s behavior

Although most of these are optional, you must provide your bot with a prompt that you can choose to make publicly visible.

You can specialize the ‘Base bot’ construction you want your model to function on, such as Claude-3-Haiku, GPT-4o-Mini, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, or other task-specific models. 

Additionally, you can provide a knowledge base (optional) for the bot to inform its responses and further refine it. (Source)

4. Finalize the bot

The last step is to finalize your bot’s creation. 

After adjusting necessary and optional settings, click or tap “Create bot” at the bottom of the page and you’ll be taken to the chat of your bot. You can test various prompts and make improvements by navigating your bot’s settings. (Source)

Poe.com Traffic and Demographics

With the increasing interest in artificial intelligence development and its place on the market, as well as Poe’s additional capabilities to create bots, Poe users tend to be more focused on development in contrast to ChatGPT users.

General overview of Poe.com

• Over September 2024, Poe.com has received over 31.5 million visitors. (Source)

• The average bounce rate of the website is 38.9%. (Source)

• The average number of pages per visit is 5.82. (Source)

• The average visit duration of Poe.com is 00:06:50. (Source)

• Poe ranks #1,529 globally, #50 by country (Hong Kong is where it currently gets the most traffic), and #2 in its category (in Hong Kong). (Source)

Traffic by country for Poe.com 

According to a traffic report from August 2024, Poe.com receives the following percentage of country traffic:

• Hong Kong: 22.05%

• United States: 13.2%

• China: 10.78%

• Vietnam: 7.07%

• Saudi Arabia: 2.83%

 (Source)

Age distribution demographics of Poe.com 

The users of Poe.com tend to fall in the following age percentages as of August 2024:

• 18-24 years: 23.19%

• 25-34 years: 31.99%

• 35-44 years: 20.03%

• 45-54 years: 13.06%

• 55-64 years: 7.22%

• 65 years and above: 4.51%

 (Source)

Traffic by gender for Poe.com 

Poe.com receives the following traffic percentage based on gender as of August 2024:

• Male: 58.41%

• Female: 41.59%

 (Source)

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Top traffic sources for Poe.com 

The Poe.com domain receives the following percentage of traffic from web sources as of August 2024:

• Direct traffic: 73.19%

• Referrals: 1.48%

• Organic Search: 24.14%

• Paid Search: 0.01%

• Social traffic: 1.15%

• Email traffic: 0.02%

• Display ads traffic: 0.01%

(Source)

Social media traffic sources for Poe.com 

Poe.com receives the following social media traffic as of August 2024: (Source)

• Quora: 60.29%

• YouTube: 14.99%

• Reddit: 8.58%

• Facebook: 4.76%

• WhatsApp: 2.8%

• Others: 8.58%

Pricing for Poe AI

Poe AI is initially free, but some of the AI models available on the platform require a premium subscription. There’s a particular limit to how many free messages you can send daily, and if you wish to override that restriction, you must subscribe to Poe Premium. (Source and Source)

• Poe AI monthly subscription: Starts at $19.99 per month. (Source)

• Poe AI annual subscription: Starts at $199.99 a year. (Source)

Poe subscriptions are also available through in-app purchases via the App Store.

Note: Poe’s prices, free trials, or offers may change. Visit their Subscriber Terms of Service page for the latest information and policies.

Poe AI Premium Subscription Overview

Subscribing to premium lifts certain restrictions and grants access to more platform features.

• Exclusive access to premium bots on Poe, including certain Claude models and GPT-4. (Source)

• Use your compute points to communicate with bots without exhausting daily message limits. (Source)

• Send more messages than free users with 1 million compute points per month. (Source)

• Receive access to new features on the platform, including experimental bots (for example, GPT-4-32k). (Source)

Poe vs. the Originality.ai AI Detector

To determine how effective Poe is at generating content that’s human-like, we’ll compare responses produced by some of the top chatbots available on the Poe platform against Originality.ai’s AI Checker. 

We’ll include extra instructions in the prompt on how to humanize the content and even provide Poe’s bot with a fully human-written article example to see if it impacts the AI’s ability to bypass the AI detection test.

[Test 1] Standard prompts

For the first test, we’ll use Poe Assistant to generate the query responses. This conversational bot is Poe’s default AI chatbot.

[Poe Assistant] Generate an 800–1000-word article on machine learning trends in 2024.

The first response we got was generated much faster in contrast to other AI bots and was 879 words in length. Let’s check how it compares with Originality.ai’s detector:

There was 100% confidence that the text was Likely AI from Originality.ai’s AI Detector. Now, let’s test some of the other bots available on the platform!

[Claude-3-Haiku] Generate an 800–1000-word article on machine learning trends in 2024.

We’ve received 895 words of output from Claude-3-Haiku after using the same prompt. These are the detection results from Originality.ai:

Once again, Originality.ai showed a strong performance with 100% confidence that the text created by Claude-3-Haiku was Likely AI.

Now, let’s compare the free version of GPT-4o on Poe (GPT-4o-Mini) with the same prompt we’ve tested so far:

[GPT-4o-Mini] Generate an 800–1000-word article on machine learning trends in 2024.

Here are the AI detection results for GPT-4o-Mini’s ouput:

From the 931 words we’ve scanned on Originality.ai, there’s 100% confidence that the text is Likely AI. 

Now, let’s get back to testing Poe’s default chatbot and include some extra instructions on humanization for the generated text.

[Test 2] Prompt requests with extra instructions

During the second stage of testing, we’ll use Poe’s default chatbot — Poe Assistant. 

The prompt instructions are to humanize the content as much as possible to see if there is any impact on Originality.ai’s detection capabilities.

[Poe Assistant] Generate an 800–1000-word article on machine learning trends in 2024. Stick to a conversational tone and sound like a human as much as possible. Break up the text with bullets and numbered lists, avoid robotic phrases, and include some first-person sentences.

The 695-word article we received from Poe had a different tone and pronouncing style in comparison to the previous results. Let’s scan it with Originality.ai:

Despite the addition of extra instructions, the Originality.ai AI Checker still identified the text as Likely AI with 100% confidence.

Moving on, we’ll now provide Poe with an entirely human-written article example and tell the bot to extract ideas from the text.

[Poe Assistant] Generate an 800–1000-word article on machine learning trends in 2024. Stick to a conversational tone and sound like a human as much as possible. Break up the text with bullets and numbered lists, avoid robotic phrases, and include some first-person sentences. Use this *article* as an example.

Let’s determine if providing Poe with an example article will influence the results:

Even after providing Poe with an example of a human-written article, the Originality.ai AI Detector showed exceptional performance, identifying the text as Likely AI with 100% confidence.

Conclusion

Now you know everything about Quora and its robust AI creation platform — Poe AI. 

With many improvements on the horizon, Poe is about to take off with its user-friendly AI bot creation interface and the majority of available AI models for a wide spectrum of users. 

Whether you’re a developer or you’re looking to try out a different AI platform which has convenient accessibility to multiple LLMs, Poe is an excellent option.