QUORA, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES AS "HUMAN" USERS INSIDE A SOCIAL

Nowadays reality exceeds the imagination of science fiction writers, and even certain blatant science fiction "events" escape the attention of "insiders", passing them under their noses... 😉
Chances are very high that most of the questions and answers you read on Quora are generated by Artificial Intelligences, even if they seem to be related to real humans, complete with biography on Quora. Quora itself publicly admits (but only if you do the appropriate research on Google) that it uses deep learning extensively to generate content on its platform.
The question-and-answer-based social Quora, which has been gaining momentum lately (CEO and founder Adam D'Angelo), is with good certainty a playground for advanced artificial intelligence deep learning. Adam D'Angelo is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist of Italian descent.
He was chief technology officer at Facebook from 2006 to 2008 and vice president of engineering. In June 2009, he launched Quora, based in Mountain View, California, thus also becoming CEO of the company.
In 2018, Adam D'Angelo joined the board of directors of OpenAI. OpenAI, founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, is a nonprofit artificial intelligence research organization with the goal of promoting and developing Friendly AI so that humanity can benefit.
The founders are Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX) and Sam Altman, president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator.
The other backers of the project (quite a bit of firepower) are:
- Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
- Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal
- Greg Brockman, former CTO of Stripe
- Jessica Livingston, founding partner of Y Combinator
- Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud services subsidiary - Infosys, an Indian IT consulting firm
Although OpenAI is a nonprofit organization, it does have products, all of which are deep learning applications. One of them is GPT2, an AI system that generates text given a tone and a topic. For example, when it was given input on the first sentence of George Orwell's novel 1984, it produced a tale of a plausible future set in China. Unlike OpenAI's previous products, GPT2 has not been released to the public to prevent its illicit use, such as writing fake news (source Wikipedia).
It is very likely that Quora is the "playground" for GPT2 or similar OpenAI applications. In 2018 alone, Quora had $20 million in revenue (source Google), yet paradoxically it doesn't sell any products or services.
So what does it sell?
Almost certainly the services of the commercial version of products developed in colaboration with OpenAI, for better profiling of consumers and their habits, values and beliefs, through a "natural" interaction, managed by deep learning applications that can also be configured as "artificial people" indistinguishable from real people in interactions.

(note: the author of this illustration to comment on the post, inspired by "Mona Lisa Overdrive" novel is me).