Poe has the goal of becoming “the YouTube of AI Bots”. Part of the thesis is that they can leverage their experience building Quora to create the infrastructure necessary to help bot creators focus on the creative parts of bot creation.
At the AGI House Poe Hackathon on Saturday, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo stated that his goal with Poe’s new creator monetization strategy was to have bot creators be able to quit their jobs because they are making enough money on Poe. As you might imagine, this went over very well with the audience. I’m sure everyone was imagining themselves as part of a new class of creator, like being a professional YouTuber or Twitch streamer. (Sounds more fun than either of those to me!)
Poe’s strategy currently involves:
Distribution: Poe ensures that its bots reach a large audience by implementing a bot recommendation system and allowing users to share chats with bots both internally and externally. They also encourage bot creators to drive traffic to their bots from outside of Poe, as this increases the likelihood of the bot being recommended on-platform.
Monetization: Poe provides a way for bot creators to generate revenue by setting a price per message that the bot creator will be paid for every message to their bot, and by offering referral fees when a bot brings new users to Poe. Poe also allows bot creators to monetize their bots through alternative means, such as placing ads in their content or asking users to visit their website to make donations or payments.
Costs: Poe covers all model inference costs and any other significant per-message costs involved in operating any bot on Poe. This is done by using the bot query API or by working with the bot creator to pay their model inference costs if they want to use a model that is not currently available on Poe. (This is a really big deal for individual bot creators.)
Multi-platform UI: Poe ensures that users have a great, consistent experience with bots no matter what device they are on. This is achieved by having a native presence on all major platforms (Web, iOS, Android, MacOS, etc) and by taking care of login and synchronized history.
Model independence: Poe allows bot creators to build their product using models from all different providers. This enables bot creators to adapt their product to use any combination of the best technologies as they are created.
I’m sure that the Poe team is already thinking about this, but I think there is one final missing piece: analytics. The only way you end up with “Mr. Beast”-level creators is by giving creators direct insight into the engagement data. For example, see how 18-year-old YouTube phenom Jenny Hoyos breaks down her “creator science”. (Spoiler alert: she literally plans everything out to the second.)
To truly become the “YouTube of AI Bots”, Poe should provide creators with a comprehensive analytics dashboard. This dashboard would allow creators to track the performance of their bots, understand user engagement, and gain insights into how their bots are being used.
Features of this dashboard could include:
Usage Statistics: Display the number of interactions, active users, session length, and other key metrics that help creators understand how their bots are being used.
Engagement Metrics: Show which parts of the bot are most engaging to users. This could include metrics like response rate, user retention, and session duration.
Error Logs: Provide detailed logs of any errors or issues that occur during bot interactions. This would help creators identify and fix problems in their bots.
User Feedback: Collect and display feedback from users. This could include ratings, reviews, and direct user feedback. At the very least, the stats on the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” user responses.
Demographic Information: If appropriate and privacy-compliant, show demographic information about the users interacting with the bot. This could help creators understand their audience better and tailor their bots to user needs.
By providing these analytics and insights, Poe would empower creators to continually improve their bots, make data-driven decisions, and ultimately create better experiences for users.
Maybe I’m still sleep deprived from Saturday’s hackathon, but I think this is going to be a really big deal. I’m excited to see what the Poe team does next. I don’t think I’ll be quitting my job anytime soon, but I can’t wait to meet the first bot creator who does!
Find me on Poe! Here’s my Poe profile link and my two currently active Poe bots:
I didn’t quite manage to finish the full workflow of Offset Monster in time for the demo, but I forced myself to present my work in progress anyways.
I met a lot of cool folks, got a ton of help from the Poe/Quora team (thank you for your patience), learned about 10 different ways to solve most of the things I was struggling with, and did sucessfully figure out how to deploy my first Poe Server bot.
Poe Hackathon at AGI House
Another time it would be fun to do a retrospective on this whole experience, but honestly I’m too tired.
Today I fixed up one of the missing pieces and now have a functional version of Offset Monster running on Poe. Check it out! This monster is ferocious and will attempt to offset the carbon footprint of anything you feed it.
Making Carbon Offsets Fun, Conversational, and Contagious
Offset Monster makes carbon offsetting more accessible and viral through a fun, conversational AI bot. After calculating the carbon footprint of anything, Offset Monster makes it easy to buy a corresponding carbon offset for the item/activity in question, on the spot.
Today I have the great privilege of being able to participate in the Poe Hackathon at the infamous AGI House.
I am frankly quite surprised that they would allow a lowly chemist such as myself to participate. I did include links to Resina and my Six Hats Helper chatbot in my application.
I’ve never participated a hackathon before. Most of the products that I have built took five to ten years to get to a minimum viable product, not five to ten hours.
Maybe it’s because I have absolutely no experience in this culture, but I am imagining fierce competition between the “stallions” of the Silicon Valley TV show.
My imagined 'competition' at today's hackathon. Image credit 'lol valley' on YouTube.
Or maybe I’m just going to hang out with a bunch of AI nerds all day. I’m stoked either way.
Here’s what I’m building today…
Offset Monster
Making Carbon Offsets Fun, Conversational, and Contagious
Offset Monster makes carbon offsetting more accessible and viral through a fun, conversational AI bot. After calculating the carbon footprint of anything, Offset Monster makes it easy to buy a corresponding carbon offset for the item/activity in question, on the spot.
I’m stuck…so close. I thought I had it all ready to rock. It didn’t work like it should have. Then the backup plan was foiled because I left that one tiny thing at home.
I can’t actually test it because I don’t have access. Anything I try will just be shooting in the dark.
I can see all the pieces, but can’t actually make progress. It’s an intellectual bardo.
What do we do in these situations?
Pen and paper? Plan it out?
Surrender and take a break?
Make a plan to be sure this never happens again?
What do we do when we can’t do what we planned to do?
Until today, I would have said that Stripe has come a long way since its start as “PayPal for developers”. Despite being valued at almost $100B, the company’s main product still does not offer an option for the most common pricing scheme in the history of the world: the volume discount.
Ironically, you can set up a volume discount for a recurring subscription, but not for a one-time purchase. Apparently no one at this massive company has ever sold physical products, or wants to. The confusing thing is that the “one time” payment option gets automatically converted to “recurring” if you pick “volume” pricing. What is truly hilarious is that Stripe’s customer support has no idea why anyone would ever want to use their product for just a one-time purchase with a volume discount.
I guess you could say that they are staying true to their founding mission: developers only. While I don’t self-identify as a developer, I can tell you that a developer could fix this oversight in about 5 minutes.
I filed a feature request, but I’m not getting my hopes up. After all, I am just a confused manufacturer of physical goods, trying to implement the most ancient of discounts. And manufacturing is only a $11 trillion industry…probably not big enough for anyone at Stripe to care.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is getting easier by the minute, I can’t keep up with the daily influx of new tools in the space. My initial experience with ChatGPT was not positive - I couldn’t believe how useless the tool was. The “hallucinations” were really what threw me off - the propensity for the LLM to just make up random information was just too high.
RAG changed all of this for me. With the ability to train the AI on my sources of truth, all of a sudden this became an indispensable tool. I really was blown away by the power of RAG to shift the functional utility of LLMs.
Today, I noticed something funny - our customer support AI seemed to have forgotten its training. It was now getting questions “wrong” that previously it had an amazing track record of answering.
The culprit? Information overload.
Originally we only trained pSai on the polySpectra documentation website and the product pages from our e-commerce store — in part because I wanted it to just be able to answer basic product questions, and in part because ran into a technical difficulty getting it to scrape the entire polyspectra website when I first set it up. Recently, I figured out how to train it on the entire polySpectra.com website, which at first seemed like a good thing.
Unexpectedly, more became less. This extra information was the RAG that broke the camel’s back. There were just enough conflicting sources of truth in the AI’s verified sources to confuse it. Where before it was doing an amazing job, now it is giving the wrong answer.
Without the sources of truth, LLMs are pretty useless customer support agents. With just enough information, they are surprisingly good. With too much, they become unhelpful again.
The role of the humans in this situation is clearly to maintain a single source of truth. It makes me wonder how many humans we’ve confused with our website over the years…much more to distill and refine.
It also makes me wonder what my “context window” is. How many things do I get confused, by having access to too many sources of information?
There is something very telling about the fact that Bing Image Creator considers this prompt to be “unsafe content”:
dia de los muertos skull, dayglow poster with extremely bright colors and black background, detailed mandala patterns and flow lines
We’ve candy-coated our dead. Halloween is for selling sugar and sexy costumes. Nothing truly scary. No room for a conversation about mortality. No room for reverence.
Disney costumes and drinks.
I’m all for the play. I’m all for the chance to assume a character.
I’m all for celebration. Death can be a tremendous celebration. I’m not suggesting we make it somber.
But death is real. And scary. And coming for each of us.
What a missed opportunity to have a really meaningful cultural conversation. It’s hard to hear the wisdom of the dead when you’re chewing on candy.
Different social media platforms have different expectations, a different culture, a different cadence. None of that interests me in the slightest.
But I am on a mission, and I have to play the game if I want anyone to read what I have to write, to hear what I have to say. RAW.works is a reset, an inquiry. How do I want to show up on the internet? How do I want to choose to engage with 8 billion people and 8 trillion robots every day?
I certainly don’t want Elon Musk choosing for me. I don’t want Alphabet choosing for me. I don’t want Apple choosing for me.
I acknowledge and respect the power of these tools. I see that if I want to show up in a search result, there are certain things I need to do to format my website for Google. With these new AI search tools like Poe Web Search [link my old post], perhaps that game is going to change a little bit. But we still need to bend to be noticed, which is increasingly true in a world where more content can be created in a day than consumed in a lifetime.
The intentionality part is: How much does that matter to me? Does SEO matter 0% to me? Does it matter 1% to me?
How far am I willing to bend my interests and my attention, to garner the interest and attention of others?
This question is at least as old as the first living organisms. The struggle to find a niche and a complex system. Initially, it was just about survival. As more and more people ascend Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it becomes more cultural, more psychological, more philosophical.
But we need to be careful, because wars and pandemics, climate chaos and rogue AGI have the potential to bring us all the way back to survival.
The memelords won’t have much to offer in the way of food and shelter. Infinite jest. Wirehead now. Xanadu.
How far am I willing to bend my interests and my attention, to garner the interest and attention of others?
On a more Adlerian plane…maybe the greatest social good is achieved when we don’t bend so much. Or at least we don’t spend so much time worrying about bending. We either bend or we don’t. We pick the way we’re willing to wiggle, or maybe the wiggle picks us, but either way — we wiggle, we dance.
