Poe: My Tool of Choice for Exploring the World of LLMs

Over the past thirteen months–since the public release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022–the AI ecosystem has exploded.

It seems like almost every day we have a new or updated LLM:

• ChatGPT 3.5
• ChatGPT 4
• Claude-instant-100k
• Claude-2-100k
• Llama-2-70b
• Mixtral-8x-7B
• Gemini-Pro

Not to mention some popular image generation tools:

• DALL-E-2
• DALL-E-3
• Playground-v2
• Stable-Diffusion-XL

As vendors compete in the AI arms race, many of these tools are free to use–at least for preview purposes.  To gain access to the newest and most powerful tools (or to avoid restrictive usage caps), you generally need to pay up.  

With all these options, though, how do you know which one to invest in?

Option E. All of the Above

After playing around with the free version of ChatGPT for awhile, I realized that these tools were the future and that I needed to invest in learning how to use them to avoid falling behind.

As companies raced to outdo each other, I didn't want to bet on the wrong horse.

And then I learned about Poe.

The poe.com site itself doesn't include much information about itself, so here's a summary of the Poe service from Wikipedia:

Poe (Platform for Open Exploration) is a service developed by Quora and launched in December 2022. It allows users to ask questions and obtain answers from a range of AI bots built on top of large language models (LLMs), including those from ChatGPT developer OpenAI, and other companies like Anthropic. It also has a subscription which allows users unlimited use for lightweight chatbot applications, such like ChatGPT and provides access, with certain limitations, to more complex and advanced artificial intelligence models such as like GPT-4 and Claude2.

In other words, a subscription to Poe gives you access to ALL the most popular LLMs and image generators, including all the ones I listed above.

Features of Poe

Here are the top reasons I use Poe:

• Easy access to several popular LLMs and AI image generators
• Ability to create and save lightweight chatbots
• Ability to upload certain file types (e.g., PDFs and Word documents) to provide context for chat conversations
• Maintains a full history of previous conversations
• The new "Knowledge Base" feature that adds support for lightweight retrieval augmented generation (RAG) benefits

Cover image generated with DALL-E-3 (via Poe)