Computing Life

Today, I canceled my paid ChatGPT subscription.

Besides GPT's declining intelligence and increasing laziness, there's another important reason: I discovered an AI platform on Quora called Poe. Poe is an integrated AI platform and community where you can use various open-source or proprietary AI models like GPT, Claude, Llama, Flux, Pika, etc., all in one place. Moreover, I found that it can replace the core functions of ChatGPT to a large extent:

1. On Poe, I can still use the latest GPT-4 series models.
2. It allows sharing chat histories, and a better feature compared to ChatGPT is that even if you delete the chat after sharing, the link remains valid.
3. It also has features similar to GPTs, allowing prompt reuse, file uploads, and knowledge-based Q&A.
4. For GPTs applications based on your own server, Poe offers a better experience with fewer restrictions. For example, GPTs require a one-question-one-answer interaction between the bot and the user, but Poe allows users to ask a question and have the bot dynamically update its response while thinking. Additionally, its timeout mechanism is more flexible.

However, compared to ChatGPT, it also has a few limitations:

1. It can't edit previous conversations, which is quite painful. But it has a unique feature that allows you to clear the context, effectively continuing the conversation in the UI while actually clearing the previous chat history. This allows us to somewhat manage the context window.
2. The voice input on the Poe mobile app seems to have a bug; if the input time is slightly long, it will clear the existing text and restart. This is very frustrating.
3. It currently doesn't support real-time voice conversations. Fortunately, I don't use this feature much.
4. It's not truly monthly subscription-based; for instance, when using GPT-4, you can only send 3000 messages per month. Luckily, this is enough for most people.
5. Although it has a DallE 3 bot, it only responds to the most recent prompt and cannot iterate and refine images with text prompts like native ChatGPT.
6. It doesn't have native search and code execution functions yet. You can summon a Web Search Bot for searches, but the lack of code execution functionality can be inconvenient for some users.

Compared to ChatGPT, Poe also has several unique advantages:

1. On this platform, besides GPT, you can directly use other open-source or proprietary AI models, including Claude.
2. You can use the same prompt to compare different AIs, which is especially helpful for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of various AIs.
3. It allows sharing chat content with all AIs, creating Q&A bots similar to GPTs, and even has its own community. This essentially transfers a series of ChatGPT functions to other AIs.
4. A feature I find particularly interesting is multi-bot collaboration. Although ChatGPT also has this capability, since they are all GPT with different prompts, it's more like competing with oneself. But Poe truly mixes different models and modalities together. For example, you can have Claude generate a complete prompt from a simple hint, then pass this prompt to Flux to generate an image, and then have Pika create a video from that image. This whole experience is quite helpful.

Overall, I think Poe is a product with very distinct pros and cons. As it stands, it can completely replace the core functions of ChatGPT for me. Compared to Claude, the only thing it lacks is the unique GUI of Artifact (as static webpage preview is already implemented). I will decide whether to cancel my Claude subscription as well after further testing.