If it's more expensive + less reliable + slower, then it's simply a wrapper. The real companies should be doing all angles better - cheaper, faster, higher qua

If it's more expensive + less reliable + slower, then it's simply a wrapper. The real companies should be doing all angles better - cheaper, faster, higher quality output, more reliable. It doesn't matter if it's simply "prompt engineering". You can add value by adding exponential backoff or using different AI providers when one is down or slow (as they usually are). There's a lot of excitement around RAGs because it lets startups play along this faster+cheaper+quality. There's domain expertise - a skilled writer can make better writing apps than some random with good prompting skills. Perplexity is probably adding extra caching layers in front of the AI so they can do it cheaper and faster.