Today we are launching creator monetization for Poe! This program lets any bot creator on Poe generate revenue. This is a major step forward for the platform and is the first program of its kind, so we are very excited to see what it lets everyone create. (thread)

Generating revenue is important for bot creators for two reasons: First, creating and marketing a great bot can require real work, and we want creators to be able to afford to make this investment, and be rewarded for it.

For the most ambitious projects, we want people to be able to start companies and hire teams of people to produce their bot. The program will support both prompt bots created directly on Poe, and server bots created by developers who write code.

Second, for anyone training their own models and running their own inference, or using a third-party AI service through an API, operating a bot can entail significant infrastructure costs, and we want them to be able to operate sustainably and profitably.

Many AI product demos that go viral get shut down because the creator can’t afford the costs and it is too much work to monetize. With this step today, we hope Poe enables a thriving economy with a wide diversity of AI products.

We expect all kinds of bots to do well, across areas like tutoring, knowledge, therapy, entertainment, assistants, analysis, storytelling, roleplay, and image, video, music, and other media generation.

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.

We are especially excited about enabling a new class of smaller AI research groups or companies to reach a large audience, those who have unique talent or technology but don’t have the resources to build and market a consumer application to mainstream consumers.

This should help access to AI diffuse throughout the world more quickly, and help those smaller researchers generate the large amounts of revenue that are needed to train bigger models and further fund their research.

See blog post with the full announcement and more details on how to participate:

Finally, if you are in the Bay Area, we are hosting a hackathon next Saturday at AGI House for people who want to experiment with this. If you’re interested, you can apply to join here!