Social question and answer platform Quora has inserted itself on the leading edge of companies helping creators monetize AI chatbots. Quora’s AI chatbot platform Poe will pay those who create prompt bots on Poe as well as developers of server bots that integrate with the Poe API. “Since this is the beginning of a new market, there are lots of opportunities to provide a valuable service for the world and make money at the same time,” said Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, envisioning a thriving bot economy across categories from tutoring and therapy to storytelling and roleplay.

“At launch, there are two ways for bot creators to generate income,” TechCrunch explains, noting that “with the first, if a bot leads a user to subscribe to Poe, the company will share a cut of the revenue back with the bot’s creator immediately,” while “another method involves bot creators setting a per-message fee, which Quora will pay on every message.” This second option will be available soon, Quora says.

Quora publicly released its Poe AI in February, letting users ask questions and get answers from a diverse range of chatbots.

VentureBeat calls Poe an “AI chatbot aggregator,” which since debuting as a test in late 2022 “has built up a following by giving users a single interface for accessing multiple competing large language models (LLMs) including OpenAI’s GPT-3.5/4, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s PaLM 2, and Meta’s Llama 2.”

According to VentureBeat, “in April, Poe opened the door to third-party creators, be they individuals or enterprises and organizations, to create their own chatbots within its platform using its supported LLMs.”

“In addition to being a way for consumers to experiment with new AI technologies in one place, the company said Poe’s content would ultimately help it to evolve its Q&A site Quora,” TechCrunch writes, qualifying that’s “if and when Poe’s content meets a high enough quality standard” to be distributed across Quora’s 400 million monthly visitors as answers.

On Saturday, Quora is hosting a hackathon at AGI House in San Francisco’s Hillsborough area “for people to experiment with creating bots that will be monetized,” D’Angelo said, inviting interested parties to apply.

“It is a plus to have experience with any of the following: prompt engineering, creating content or websites that go viral, Poe bot development, working with LLMs, Python development, or otherwise being an experienced hacker,” the invite says.