Down the Chatbot Rabbit Hole

Further generations of humans--or robots--might one day look back on this week as the tipping point in the way that computers and people interact. On Monday, CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google's new chatbot, dubbed Bard, based on its previously disclosed AI bot LaMDA. A day later, Microsoft unveiled a new version of search engine Bing, powered by OpenAI's breakaway hit ChatGPT. But I had already tumbled into that rabbit hole after pondering a less-heralded beta product soft-launched last December and opened to the public a week ago. It is a chatbot called Poe, produced by, of all companies, Quora, a 14-year-old social network that helps users find answers to questions by tapping the knowledge of other users. Like Quora itself, you type in your question and wait for the answer.