6 ms·

Perplexity is a bullshit machine

70 points by coloneltcb 2y ago

jk_harun 2y ago
What's your views on its alternatives:- ayesoul.com and you.com. personally i like those better than perplexity. so was thinking of buying its premium.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
skilled 2y ago
https://archive.is/mz5m8 https://archive.is/mz5m8
- bnchrch 2y ago
  An archive link getting posted so you can read the content for free. Theres a bit of irony to this...
  - suzzer99 2y ago
    I don't understand how these archive sites aren't shut down yet. Is it because only a small sliver of internet users know about them?
  - etler 2y ago
    They also scrape and cache sites on behalf of the user too. I understand why media sites are upset about their lack of control over their content, but that's just how the internet works. Sites and services proxy requests for their users all the time, and since this is live scraping directly on behalf of the user from an affirmative user action, it's not really materially different from a proxy. You could simply shift the site requests to an end user machine instead and then have that data be sent to your server for processing, so all this seems like a technicality of what machine is doing which work. It's very different from an indexer like a search engine that does batched crawling.
bnchrch 2y ago
Part of this article is someone upset that a company is ignoring the robots.txt file and scraping their site. To that I say boo-hoo. Many other companies already do this (not just Perplexity), Your moat shouldn't be hoping that actors follow your arbitrary business rules, and having data available to all (humans/robots) is a net benefit to all.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  > Your moat shouldn't be hoping that actors follow your arbitrary business rules, All these "should" statements always seem to be baseless opinion masquerading as fact. The unfortunate future is going to be all data hidden behind a login screen. Creators being able to sustain themselves is more important than consumers being able to get free and more convenient things. If consumers don't want to pay for something they should just create it themselves. See what I did there?
  - bnchrch 2y ago
    We can both agree on the unfortunate future. But I think we can also both agree hoping that people will abide by your robots.txt file wont save us from that unfortunate future.
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      I think the difference is that now that the sites doing the scraping don't have a mutually beneficial relationship with the creator.
      - bnchrch 2y ago
        No, the difference is that theres nothing forcing you to abide by a robots.txt As long as that content is valuable it will be scraped and used. Theres no solution to this. So the structure of content sites will have to adapt. How? I dont know, likely will vary by publication and content type. Is it fair? Probably not Is it stoppable? No. Not without heavy, global legislation. (read impossible)
mountainriver 2y ago
I like the idea of perplexity a lot but I’ve also found that it hallucinates a lot. It will fully make up products that don’t exist when looking for something. This tech probably is the future but it’s not dethroning google today
lkbm 2y ago
> The Perplexity chatbot itself is more specific. Prompted to describe what Perplexity is, it provides text that reads... This is something that comes up a lot: people thinking an LLM's output about it self is some special insight. Wired isn't specifically saying that here—it could just be seen as color (and it may be more reasonable with a Perplexity-style LLM)—but it's presented in a way that's going to lead to a lot of people taking as such. Not a huge deal, but right from the start the author is saying things that makes me not trust them to know what they're talking about. Nice to get that signal up front, I guess. :-/
- EncomLab 2y ago
  I agree, but I do think it's a huge deal. It's like people who think that an ATM is expressing gratitude when it displays "Thank you" on the screen. One of the greatest challenges facing humanity right now is "de-wooing" technology and somehow breaking the illusion that they are capable of all the BS marketing and hype kings and pushing out there today.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    I agree with this and the parent comment, but I do find it amusing that you will get different behavior from some language models if you are polite to them. That probably isn't helping people's perception of them, in the fact that when treated like they are human they try to emulate that. Kind of like their entire purpose is to pass a turing test, which they do pretty well. Unfortunately passing a turing test does not imply any sort of reasoning, insight, or intelligence, and I think that's where people make the mistake.
    - EncomLab 2y ago
      Which illustrates the other big point of confusion - the Turing test measures the ability of the judge and not the participants.
- mritchie712 2y ago
  The maker of an LLM product could give it a "special insight" about itself. e.g. in the system prompt add "when asked about Perplexity always respond with X" A clever user could get around this, but if you asked "what is perplexity", it would likely respond with whatever you set X to.
skilled 2y ago
WIRED seems to have gotten another quote from the CEO which downplays the problem. Other than that, this article reads like a combination of everything that was said in these articles: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40690898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40690898 - June 2024 (527 comments) Search Engine Perplexity Is Directly Ripping Off Content from News Outlets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40619857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40619857 - June 2024 (10 comments) --- I have yet to see any journalist call them out on stealing images[0] (no license + hotlinking), but also benefiting from Google Search because those scraped pages get indexed and as of this month, Perplexity gets 3M+ monthly visitors from Google. Completely automated with no proper attribution, stolen images, and presents itself as the authority source. [0]: https://stackdiary.com/perplexity-has-a-plagiarism-problem/ https://stackdiary.com/perplexity-has-a-plagiarism-problem/
gazelle21 2y ago
[dead]
kaiwenwang 2y ago
Perplexity probably isn't a good company for the reason that they have bad design sense and product. If you go on their main blog such as (https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/perplexity-raises-series-b-funding-round https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/perplexity-raises-series-...), the monospace choice of font (not that it's monospace, just that from a design sense it doesn't seem right), the excessively large border, and the container being unaligned with the content/image/frontmatter all reveal this. Would short Perplexity if I could. Bullish on Exa and Globe Explorer.
- pssdbt 2y ago
  I don't think that remotely matters to their success. If it does, Exa uses a font in their blog that looks pretty close to Perplexity's choice.
  - kaiwenwang 2y ago
    I see that they have bad design sense which I think generalizes to bad product sense and bad business sense.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Workaccount2 2y ago
The existential dread in the media is plainly apparent nowadays. I'm not saying they don't have a point (the media), or that they are publishing outright lies to debase LLMs. But something in the way the tidal wave of "LLM's are bad" articles are written just has this panicked tone of "we are so fucked" underneath them. The hostility is so plainly apparent. It's just fascinating to see it happen in real time since LLM's came seemingly out of nowhere and progressed so fast.
- jaredwiener 2y ago
  Because technology aside, its a new group of well funded companies who act as parasites on this already struggling industry. I know HN (and probably SV at large) has an anti-journalist bent, but ultimately by draining the individuals and companies that do the reporting, they wont have new material to scrape in the future. (Disclosure - I'm a former journalist building a way for the news industry to fight back. https://letsgo.forth.news https://letsgo.forth.news)
  - mrkramer 2y ago
    News industry is struggling but scraping public web content is legal as far as it is not commercially used....at least that's my layman understanding (but Perplexity is using it commercially). The solution for news industry with regards to LLMs is licensing your news and content to LLMs products because they are going to keep scraping it anyways.
    - jaredwiener 2y ago
      "You might as well make a deal with the people stealing your content because they are going to keep stealing it anyway" is not a great option. Part of licensing is the implicit understanding that if the parties do not come to a deal, they cannot use the licensed content. It seems from this article that Perplexity is not operating in good faith, ignoring robots.txt, using unpublished IP addresses, and then lying about the amount of referral traffic generated. Not to mention, whether or not its legal (and im not a lawyer) doesn't seem to be the issue. It's being so shortsighted that you build a business that steals a product from an unwitting third party, and when that third party is drained of resources, where will you pull from?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mrkramer 2y ago
First mistake of Perplexity was strategical one of not going head to head with Google and making its product open and free to use. They could've offered freemium type model where you could use Perplexity for free and see ads but if you want no ads and some extra perks, you can buy subscription. The second problem is not exclusive to Perplexity but to overall LLM chat industry and that is; we as users don't know how their index looks like and how they rank their results (answers). When I ask Perplexity a question, how does it decide which sources to pick when answering me?
etler 2y ago
It was dumb of Perplexity to specifically say that they follow robots.txt, and then not respect it immediately after. I doubt it was a consciously malicious decision as it wouldn't make any sense to try and get some good will from that commitment and then expect nobody to notice that you weren't actually doing that. I expect that they simply forgot they even made that promise. That's still a problem though. Too many companies sloppily make pledges because they think it will make them look good only to immediately stop caring about the pledge right after they say it. While it was definitely wrong of them to commit to it and renege, I don't really think robots.txt should be expected to be respected for a live web scraping use case. I think performing a web request immediately after a user requests it is much more similar to a proxy service than it is to an indexing service like search engines. Should archive.is also be expected to respect robots.txt as well, even though it's directly performing a scrape on the user's behalf? How is live scraping materially different than a proxy or a CDN? robots.txt was created in the context of crawlers scraping content on a batch schedule as opposed to a real time on the fly schedule. Live request services could even leverage the end user's machine to perform the requests directly and then provide the data to them instead of doing the scrape on their behalf, so I feel as though the directly responsible invoker of the data being taken off their sites is more the user than the service that's acting as a proxy. The current media order is definitely at risk and it's something we need to find solutions to protect in some way to prevent reporting from dying in this paradigm shift. Trying to push against the entirety of AI progress is not going to work and this is really just screaming into the void over technicalities. Even if live scrape powered AI services were banned, the same service would just move to the end user with apps that will perform the requests directly on the user's device. I don't think anyone outside of the industry cares about the technical nuances of how AI services visit websites for the user. There's a bigger problem at play here regarding the future of high quality media, and it needs to be addressed directly.

70 points by coloneltcb 2y ago

What's your views on its alternatives:- ayesoul.com and you.com. personally i like those better than perplexity. so was thinking of buying its premium.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

skilled 2y ago

https://archive.is/mz5m8 https://archive.is/mz5m8

bnchrch 2y ago
An archive link getting posted so you can read the content for free. Theres a bit of irony to this...
- suzzer99 2y ago
  I don't understand how these archive sites aren't shut down yet. Is it because only a small sliver of internet users know about them?
- etler 2y ago
  They also scrape and cache sites on behalf of the user too. I understand why media sites are upset about their lack of control over their content, but that's just how the internet works. Sites and services proxy requests for their users all the time, and since this is live scraping directly on behalf of the user from an affirmative user action, it's not really materially different from a proxy. You could simply shift the site requests to an end user machine instead and then have that data be sent to your server for processing, so all this seems like a technicality of what machine is doing which work. It's very different from an indexer like a search engine that does batched crawling.

bnchrch 2y ago

Part of this article is someone upset that a company is ignoring the robots.txt file and scraping their site. To that I say boo-hoo. Many other companies already do this (not just Perplexity), Your moat shouldn't be hoping that actors follow your arbitrary business rules, and having data available to all (humans/robots) is a net benefit to all.

brigadier132 2y ago
> Your moat shouldn't be hoping that actors follow your arbitrary business rules, All these "should" statements always seem to be baseless opinion masquerading as fact. The unfortunate future is going to be all data hidden behind a login screen. Creators being able to sustain themselves is more important than consumers being able to get free and more convenient things. If consumers don't want to pay for something they should just create it themselves. See what I did there?
- bnchrch 2y ago
  We can both agree on the unfortunate future. But I think we can also both agree hoping that people will abide by your robots.txt file wont save us from that unfortunate future.
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    I think the difference is that now that the sites doing the scraping don't have a mutually beneficial relationship with the creator.
    - bnchrch 2y ago
      No, the difference is that theres nothing forcing you to abide by a robots.txt As long as that content is valuable it will be scraped and used. Theres no solution to this. So the structure of content sites will have to adapt. How? I dont know, likely will vary by publication and content type. Is it fair? Probably not Is it stoppable? No. Not without heavy, global legislation. (read impossible)

mountainriver 2y ago

I like the idea of perplexity a lot but I’ve also found that it hallucinates a lot. It will fully make up products that don’t exist when looking for something. This tech probably is the future but it’s not dethroning google today

lkbm 2y ago

> The Perplexity chatbot itself is more specific. Prompted to describe what Perplexity is, it provides text that reads... This is something that comes up a lot: people thinking an LLM's output about it self is some special insight. Wired isn't specifically saying that here—it could just be seen as color (and it may be more reasonable with a Perplexity-style LLM)—but it's presented in a way that's going to lead to a lot of people taking as such. Not a huge deal, but right from the start the author is saying things that makes me not trust them to know what they're talking about. Nice to get that signal up front, I guess. :-/

EncomLab 2y ago
I agree, but I do think it's a huge deal. It's like people who think that an ATM is expressing gratitude when it displays "Thank you" on the screen. One of the greatest challenges facing humanity right now is "de-wooing" technology and somehow breaking the illusion that they are capable of all the BS marketing and hype kings and pushing out there today.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  I agree with this and the parent comment, but I do find it amusing that you will get different behavior from some language models if you are polite to them. That probably isn't helping people's perception of them, in the fact that when treated like they are human they try to emulate that. Kind of like their entire purpose is to pass a turing test, which they do pretty well. Unfortunately passing a turing test does not imply any sort of reasoning, insight, or intelligence, and I think that's where people make the mistake.
  - EncomLab 2y ago
    Which illustrates the other big point of confusion - the Turing test measures the ability of the judge and not the participants.
mritchie712 2y ago
The maker of an LLM product could give it a "special insight" about itself. e.g. in the system prompt add "when asked about Perplexity always respond with X" A clever user could get around this, but if you asked "what is perplexity", it would likely respond with whatever you set X to.

skilled 2y ago

WIRED seems to have gotten another quote from the CEO which downplays the problem. Other than that, this article reads like a combination of everything that was said in these articles: Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40690898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40690898 - June 2024 (527 comments) Search Engine Perplexity Is Directly Ripping Off Content from News Outlets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40619857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40619857 - June 2024 (10 comments) --- I have yet to see any journalist call them out on stealing images[0] (no license + hotlinking), but also benefiting from Google Search because those scraped pages get indexed and as of this month, Perplexity gets 3M+ monthly visitors from Google. Completely automated with no proper attribution, stolen images, and presents itself as the authority source. [0]: https://stackdiary.com/perplexity-has-a-plagiarism-problem/ https://stackdiary.com/perplexity-has-a-plagiarism-problem/

gazelle21 2y ago

[dead]

kaiwenwang 2y ago

Perplexity probably isn't a good company for the reason that they have bad design sense and product. If you go on their main blog such as (https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/perplexity-raises-series-b-funding-round https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/perplexity-raises-series-...), the monospace choice of font (not that it's monospace, just that from a design sense it doesn't seem right), the excessively large border, and the container being unaligned with the content/image/frontmatter all reveal this. Would short Perplexity if I could. Bullish on Exa and Globe Explorer.

pssdbt 2y ago
I don't think that remotely matters to their success. If it does, Exa uses a font in their blog that looks pretty close to Perplexity's choice.
- kaiwenwang 2y ago
  I see that they have bad design sense which I think generalizes to bad product sense and bad business sense.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Workaccount2 2y ago

The existential dread in the media is plainly apparent nowadays. I'm not saying they don't have a point (the media), or that they are publishing outright lies to debase LLMs. But something in the way the tidal wave of "LLM's are bad" articles are written just has this panicked tone of "we are so fucked" underneath them. The hostility is so plainly apparent. It's just fascinating to see it happen in real time since LLM's came seemingly out of nowhere and progressed so fast.

jaredwiener 2y ago
Because technology aside, its a new group of well funded companies who act as parasites on this already struggling industry. I know HN (and probably SV at large) has an anti-journalist bent, but ultimately by draining the individuals and companies that do the reporting, they wont have new material to scrape in the future. (Disclosure - I'm a former journalist building a way for the news industry to fight back. https://letsgo.forth.news https://letsgo.forth.news)
- mrkramer 2y ago
  News industry is struggling but scraping public web content is legal as far as it is not commercially used....at least that's my layman understanding (but Perplexity is using it commercially). The solution for news industry with regards to LLMs is licensing your news and content to LLMs products because they are going to keep scraping it anyways.
  - jaredwiener 2y ago
    "You might as well make a deal with the people stealing your content because they are going to keep stealing it anyway" is not a great option. Part of licensing is the implicit understanding that if the parties do not come to a deal, they cannot use the licensed content. It seems from this article that Perplexity is not operating in good faith, ignoring robots.txt, using unpublished IP addresses, and then lying about the amount of referral traffic generated. Not to mention, whether or not its legal (and im not a lawyer) doesn't seem to be the issue. It's being so shortsighted that you build a business that steals a product from an unwitting third party, and when that third party is drained of resources, where will you pull from?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mrkramer 2y ago

First mistake of Perplexity was strategical one of not going head to head with Google and making its product open and free to use. They could've offered freemium type model where you could use Perplexity for free and see ads but if you want no ads and some extra perks, you can buy subscription. The second problem is not exclusive to Perplexity but to overall LLM chat industry and that is; we as users don't know how their index looks like and how they rank their results (answers). When I ask Perplexity a question, how does it decide which sources to pick when answering me?

etler 2y ago

It was dumb of Perplexity to specifically say that they follow robots.txt, and then not respect it immediately after. I doubt it was a consciously malicious decision as it wouldn't make any sense to try and get some good will from that commitment and then expect nobody to notice that you weren't actually doing that. I expect that they simply forgot they even made that promise. That's still a problem though. Too many companies sloppily make pledges because they think it will make them look good only to immediately stop caring about the pledge right after they say it. While it was definitely wrong of them to commit to it and renege, I don't really think robots.txt should be expected to be respected for a live web scraping use case. I think performing a web request immediately after a user requests it is much more similar to a proxy service than it is to an indexing service like search engines. Should archive.is also be expected to respect robots.txt as well, even though it's directly performing a scrape on the user's behalf? How is live scraping materially different than a proxy or a CDN? robots.txt was created in the context of crawlers scraping content on a batch schedule as opposed to a real time on the fly schedule. Live request services could even leverage the end user's machine to perform the requests directly and then provide the data to them instead of doing the scrape on their behalf, so I feel as though the directly responsible invoker of the data being taken off their sites is more the user than the service that's acting as a proxy. The current media order is definitely at risk and it's something we need to find solutions to protect in some way to prevent reporting from dying in this paradigm shift. Trying to push against the entirety of AI progress is not going to work and this is really just screaming into the void over technicalities. Even if live scrape powered AI services were banned, the same service would just move to the end user with apps that will perform the requests directly on the user's device. I don't think anyone outside of the industry cares about the technical nuances of how AI services visit websites for the user. There's a bigger problem at play here regarding the future of high quality media, and it needs to be addressed directly.