Google made a mistake, Quora has an AI chatbot app

Oh, noes, a rushed product launch went wrong, stop the planet!

Like in sports or politics, publications might have a bias towards one side or the other when we have a tech war. This is totally visible when looking at the coverage of Google’s mistake with Bard, their AI Chatbot.

If you have not seen it written on the sky already, Google posted a gif showing Bard interface with the question “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?”

Among other facts, Bard states that the telescope “took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.” This is not true as pointed out by numerous internet users.

Suddenly AI Chatbots are not suitable to replace search engines, the future is not here yet! Tech news websites cry in confusion!

Not that big of a deal in my opinion, but very juicy topic to write about. That could have been a human mistake from the graphics department and not a real recording of Bart Chatbot or just a bad version of that chatbot. Also, Generative AI technology is not baked, it’s experimental.

Anyway, that big AI search announcement Microsoft made yesterday does not mean the future of search is here. You can’t have a “future of search party” without Google. And Google is not ready, and until Google is ready, the revolution will be slow or stagnant.

Google did not have planned a Chatbot launch for this week. Monday’s announcement was rushed, but they did announce small bump improvements to their search engine and other services, most of them based on AI technologies. Today at their live event from Paris, they presented enhanced Translate service, NeRF-powered Maps, the next iteration of Lens, their visual search project, and a bunch of other planned updates.

AI was the keyword and they even demoed how they will use Generative AI to summarize search results (will they summarize the ads?)

War is heating up and Apple hasn’t even entered the game yet. I’m sure they can shake things up even If they’re not working on a chatbot.

In other news, I played a little with Quora’s chatbot. Yes, Quora has a chatbot, but they’re smart, it is not integrated into Quora and it’s not named QuoraAI.

They know the technology is not ready, so they launched a beta version in a form of a separate app called Poe. You can get it here if you have an iOS device, Android is not ready yet.

Poe introduces an interesting Concept, Poe has 3 chatbots and each of them is marked as a “general knowledge bot”, this means they will eventually have specialized custom-trained bots (by topic of interest or other criteria).

Another interesting fact is that out of the three bots available in Poe, two are based on ChatGPT (Sage and Dragonfly) and one on Antrophic (Claude). Antrophic is a competitor of OpenAI and they just received a $300m investment from Google.

All the bots seem much more regulated and “behaved” than the free web version of ChatGPT with Claud being the most serious and closer to a chatbot meant to replace search engines.

The overall interaction is much faster than what ChatGPT offers, answers are snappier and the fact that it’s a native iOS app greatly improves the experience on mobile.

Quora’s CEO states that Poe's role is to help small AI Developers deploy faster to market their Generative AI based products. Probably you will be able to have your bot available in Poe among many others if you’re an AI Developer. I like the concept!

Give it a try, and write a comment with your opinion below (or not).