At the beginning of February, and after a few months of preliminary tests, Quora decided to open access to Poe, its metachatbot, to all users who wished to try it. The only notable limitation, in this sense, is that from then until now, the service could only be accessed from its app, which is only available for iOS. Thus, if you have an iPhone, until now you could download it and use its different chatbots in an unlimited way.
As we already told you at that time, and unlike what services such as ChatGPT and the Bing chatbot offer, in this case we do not find Quora’s own technology or that of a partner, but with an app that offers us access to various chatbots, with which we can have independent conversations (the conversations do not mix with each other). Thus, from the same interface, we can make the same query to several AIs (each in its own section, yes) and compare the different answers.
Initially, when it was released to everyone (well, everyone with an iPhone, you know what I mean), Poe had three chatbots, Sage and Dragonflywhich are based on OpenAI models (gpt-3.5-turbo and text-davinci-003, respectively), and claude, an Anthropic model that has begun to gain considerable relevance for some time now. In addition, as Quora already announced, their plans included continuing to add chatbots to the service in the future.
It seems that the tests this month must have gone well, since now Quora has announced important news for the service, and that is that Poe is already accessible from the browser, adds several new chatbots, including GPT-4 and Claude+ (although with limitations) and also launches a subscription plan, paid, which is precisely related to said Anthropic and OpenAI chatbots. Let’s see these news in parts.
The most notable is, without a doubt, the web access to Poe. You can now access the service from this link. When doing it for the first time you will have to register or log in, if you have previously used it on iOS. In the latter case, you will be able to verify that all your conversation history with the chatbots has been synchronized, so you will be able to resume from the browser the conversations that you were having, until now, from your mobile. And of course, also vice versa, because when you access from the app the content generated from the browser will also be displayed.
The second notable novelty is that there are now six chatbots integrated in Poe (although two of them are based on the same model, specifically in gpt-3.5-turbo), since ChatGPT, the newly introduced GPT-4 and Claude+ have been added (Claude-1.2), a more advanced version of the Claude model that is already present in Poe from the start. However, access to the latter two is quite limited, since we can only make a daily consultation. So, this is the list of chatbots that we can currently find in the service, with their descriptions given by Quora:
- claude: Usually better at many creative writing tasks, but more likely to refuse to answer questions.
- claude+: He is significantly better than Claude, especially in languages other than English. In English, he also generates more detailed answers than Claude.
- sage and ChatGPT: They tend to be better at languages other than English, and are better at programming-related tasks.
- Dragonfly: tends to give shorter answers, and it can be easier to get Dragonfly to follow instructions when given examples in the input.
- GPT-4: This is a major advance over ChatGPT and is the most powerful language model available today. It is especially powerful in creative writing, problem solving (for example, math and physics), and following directions.
And last, but by no means least interesting, we find the premium plan announced by Quora, which will provide us with still limited, but much broader, access to both GPT-4 and Claude+. Specifically, we will be able to up to 300 monthly queries to GPT-4 and up to 1,000 monthly queries to Claude+.
A very striking limitation, yes, is that the premium mode of Poe can only be contracted, at least for now, from Apple devices, since they currently only support payments through the App Store. However, as we can read in the web version of the service, «We are still working to implement subscription payments on the web.«, which invites us to think that alternative means of payment should not take too long to appear, and even less if they consider, at some point, also making the leap to Android, something that I do not understand how they have not already done.
Regarding the price, Poe offers two possibilities: monthly payment, in which case the fee is €22.99or annual payment, which will be €229.99. Thus, for users who are going to make medium use, and who want to access both GPT-4 and Claude+, it seems like a pretty interesting option. However, for those who want to do more intensive use, and especially if they opt for GPT-4, ChatGPT Plus seems like a more convenient option.
