Quora’s Poe is launching subscriptions to let you chat with GPT-4-powered bot

Yesterday, OpenAI unveiled its new GPT-4 model and competitor Anthropic unveiled its own ChatGPT competitor, Claude. Parallelly, Quora announced that its chatbot app Poe will now have a paid tier that will let you ask questions to bots powered by these models.

Poe subscriptions will set you back $19.99 per month or $199.99 per year, and you can only buy it at the moment from your iOS or Apple Silicon-powered Mac. The company is working on making the paid plan available to purchase on the web.

Quora first launched Poe last December as a closed beta and later opened it up to all iOS users last month.

Quora’s CEO Adam D’Angelo said in a Twitter thread that paying users can chat with bots powered by GPT-4 and Claude+ (version 1.2). Sadly, the paid tier doesn’t allow you to ask unlimited questions with these models. Poe caps the usage to 300 GPT-4 and 1,000 Claude 1.2 messages per month. The service said that once a user reaches the monthly limit, “bot availability or quality may be reduced.”

At the moment, free users can also test and ask these models one question per day without any cost. D’Angelo said that users can have unlimited interactions with other bots like ChatGPT, Claude, Sage and Dragonfly. Poe describes these models to have different roles and features. Here is what the company says about these bots:

    • Claude tends to be better at many creative writing tasks, but it is more likely to refuse to answer questions.
    • Claude+ is significantly better than Claude, especially in non-English languages. In English, it generates more in-depth answers than Claude, as well.
    • Sage and ChatGPT tend to be better at languages other than English, and are better at programming-related tasks.
    • Dragonfly tends to have shorter responses, and it can be easier to get Dragonfly to follow instructions when given examples in the input.
    • GPT-4 is a major advance relative to ChatGPT and is the most powerful language model available to the world today. It is particularly strong at creative writing, problem-solving (e.g. math and physics) and instruction following.

Notably, models like Sage and Claude don’t have knowledge of events post-2021 and Dragonfly might refuse to answer some questions. When you start a conversation with a bot, the app shows you a warning saying that it might make incorrect statements so that you don’t take the answers at their face value. These are some safeguards against manipulating bots into saying problematic or incorrect things.

Currently, Quora and Poe are not directly connected. But last month, the company said that if Poe’s generated content meet certain benchmarks, its answers could be distributed on the Q&A platform with more than 400 million monthly users.

Along with Poe, Duolingo also announced a GPT-4-powered subscription that enables an AI-based tutor to learn languages. Microsoft also broke its vow of silence and confirmed that Bing was using GPT-4 all along. Plus, the Bing chat now has an increased daily limit of 150 messages. Khan Academy said it is testing an AI assistant that will help teachers with administrative tasks as a teaching assistant. On the other hand, students can take advantage of it to get help with math and suggest ideas for stories.

Given that OpenAI and Anthropic just made announcements about new bots, we will have more consumer applications adopting this technology.