The days of chatting with an AI alone are most likely coming to an end. On Monday, Quora’s Poe launched a group chat functionality that allows up to 200 people to collaborate across more than 200 AI models, including text, image, video, and audio, all within a single conversation.
This couldn’t be more perfectly timed since it has only been a few days since OpenAI started pilot testing its own group chats in a handful of markets across Asia. They want to make sure that AI isn’t just a tool for individuals, but a collaborative space for friends, teams, and entire communities.
The concept sounds simple. Bring multiple people and multiple AI models into one conversation. But the execution is anything but. Users can now start group chats from Poe’s home screen, invite up to 199 other people, and then tap into any combination of AI models or creator-made bots like Claude 4.5 Sonnet, GPT-5.1, ElevenLabs v3, Kling 2.5 Turbo Pro, o3 Deep Research, Sora 2 Pro, Veo 3.1, and dozens of others.
The chat history syncs in real time across devices. You start a conversation on desktop and continue it on mobile. The thread never breaks and the context never gets lost. It’s the kind of seamless experience that sounds obvious until you realize how hard it is to build at scale.
Building something this smooth isn’t easy. Quora’s team spent half a year making sure Poe could handle 200 people chatting with 200 different AI bots at once, without the whole thing falling over. The behind-the-scenes engineering is very critical and it makes the result feel easy to use.
Why Does It Matter?
On the surface, group chat is a feature. In practice, it’s a rethinking of what AI platforms are for. For the past two years, AI chatbots have been glorified search engines with personality. You ask a question. The AI responds, and it goes on and on.
Even the best implementations, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, have remained fundamentally transactional. One user, one AI, one interaction. Poe is betting on the future being transactional.
Families planning vacations together using Gemini 2.5’s search capabilities alongside o3 Deep Research. Creative teams brainstorming mood boards by mixing multiple image models in real time.
Study groups running trivia games with quiz bots while simultaneously fact-checking answers with research models. These aren’t hypothetical use cases. They’re what Quora explicitly designed the feature to enable.
Also, Poe isn’t locking users into a single AI ecosystem. You can mix Claude, GPT, Gemini, and a dozen other models in the same conversation. That model-agnostic approach is Poe’s defining strategic advantage. While OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are building walled gardens, Quora is building the neutral platform where all the gardens connect.
OpenAI’s group chat pilot launched in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan. Limited markets, Single model (GPT-5.1), and in a Testing phase. Poe launched globally, with access to 200+ models, available immediately. That’s not a pilot. That’s a finished product.
ChatGPT has brand recognition, a massive user base, and OpenAI’s relentless marketing machine. But Poe has flexibility, breadth, and a value proposition that’s increasingly hard to ignore. Why lock yourself into one AI when you can access all of them?
For users who’ve been frustrated by the limitations of single-model platforms, GPT is great at reasoning but weak at visual generation. Claude excels at writing but lacks real-time web search. Poe offers something ChatGPT fundamentally can’t, which is the ability to use the right tool for the right task without switching apps.
The Platform Play
Poe isn’t just aggregating existing AI models. It’s enabling anyone to create custom bots and share them for group use. That’s a platform play, not a product play.
If Poe can build a thriving ecosystem of creator-made bots, specialized tools for niche use cases, industry-specific applications, workflow automation, then it stops being just another AI chat app. It becomes infrastructure.
The operating system for collaborative AI work. And infrastructure is stickier than features. Features get copied while infrastructure gets entrenched.
The real question is whether anyone actually needs group AI chats. The answer, based on early usage patterns, seems to be yes, but not for the reasons you’d expect.
Group chats aren’t replacing solo AI interactions. They’re creating a new category: AI-mediated collaboration. Instead of one person querying an AI and then sharing results with a team, the entire team participates in the query process. The AI becomes a participant in group decision-making rather than a solo research assistant.
That shift is subtle but big. It changes AI from a tool you use alone to infrastructure your team depends on. And once teams start depending on it, switching costs skyrocket.
Quora says it spent six months building this feature and plans continuous improvements based on user feedback. That timeline matters. It suggests this wasn’t a reactionary response to ChatGPT’s pilot. This was a bet made half a year ago that collaborative AI would become the next major platform shift.
The question is whether Quora bet correctly. If collaborative AI takes off the way multiplayer gaming, collaborative docs, and shared workspaces did, Poe positioned itself early. If it doesn’t and users prefer solo AI interactions, then Quora just spent six months building infrastructure for a market that doesn’t exist yet.
Betting on the future of collaboration has historically been a smart move. Google Docs, Slack, Figma, Notion, every major productivity platform of the last decade was built on collaborative infrastructure. AI might be the exception.
The fight between Poe and ChatGPT isn’t about features. It’s about vision. OpenAI believes the future is single-model dominance while Quora believes the future is multi-model collaboration. Only time will tell who comes out on top.
