Poe is Now The Most Useful GenAI App

Poe

I’ve been using the heck out of a good number of generative AI (GenAI) apps for over a year now. For a good chunk of that time Perplexity has been my favorite and most used out of all the apps I work with. I’ve written about it a lot here; here’s just one example that talks about one of the things I have used it for most often, and its best features:

AI Apps for Cybersecurity Professionals

Pi has been and still is a favorite GenAI app too. It is the only one I have seen so far that is capable of continuous conversations. Some of the other GenAI apps and tools I use and find great value in using include Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT and its latest GPT 4 model, Claude’s latest Claude-3-Opus apps, and Microsoft’s Copilot.

As of this week, there is a new sheriff in my GenAI apps town. A single GenAI tool that I think will rule them all for me, though I always have to qualify that because things move at such an incredible pace in this area.

Two Reasons That Poe is Now the Most Useful Gen AI App

Reason 1

The first reason has been the big selling point for Poe from the beginning - access to a large array of models and great value for money. To use a pro version of many of the most capable chatbots you need to take on a subscription, and most of them are around $20 per month. That’s the rate for Perplexity, and for ChatGPT / OpenAI subscriptions, for example.

Poe is also priced at $20 per month. Here’s the difference: with Poe you get access to over 50 bots . Though some of those are just versions of the same model - Claude-2 and Claude-3 for instance - there are still a lot of options. And they include close to or all the leading models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral, and more. Here’s a screencap of just a section of the bots available to me with my subscription:

Poe Your Bots

Reason 2

This week Poe added something that is the most exciting new feature I’ve seen yet in any GenAI tool: Multi-bot chat. Here’s their intro to it:

Today we are adding an important new capability to Poe: multi-bot chat. This feature lets you easily chat with multiple models in a single thread.

Multi-bot chat is important because different models have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are optimized for specific tasks and others have unique knowledge. As you query a bot on Poe, you now can compare answers from recommended bots with one click, and summon any bot you prefer by @-mentioning the bot - all within the same conversation thread. This new ability lets you easily compare results from various bots and discover optimal combinations of models to use the best tool for each step in a workflow.

When I first saw this news at the beginning of the week my first thought was how cool is that. Today I got a chance to try Multi-bot chat out and I can say it is very cool. And that is a big understatement of course. I’ve seen firsthand the significant benefits of working with different apps/models on almost any task or project. This new feature means I can make that happen much more quickly, and I’ve tested that out on the web app and on my phone this morning. The screenshot below is from the web app.

On the Pixel 8 Pro I started by asking ChatGPT, GPT 4, about the biggest cyber threats facing enterprise organizations in 2024. Once I got GPT 4’s response, I used Compare to get Claude-3-Opus into the conversation. As you can see in this next screenshot, Claude responds as if speaking directly to GPT 4:

Poe Multi-bot chat

I then used the @ <chatbot name> feature to add Mistral Large to the discussion

The entire “conversation’ with the three bots took just seconds to play out, and the responses are available for me to re-read and review in the Android app and synced in real-time to the web app.

To sum up, I’ll repeat myself. I have not seen a better GenAI app feature than this one anywhere so far. I think there is a growing consensus around the idea that using multiple bots, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and using them for the tasks they’re best suited for is the best way to get the most out of them. Poe just made this way easier to do.