4 ms·

> ...to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. That sounds liking replacing striking staff to me, at least for the durat

> ...to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. That sounds liking replacing striking staff to me, at least for the duration of the election. What other services of value except LLMs to write articles does Perplexity have to offer to the New York Times?

lxgr 2y ago
> That sounds liking replacing striking staff to me That's my read too, but they could also e.g. lend them some engineers, have them build an election dashboard for them etc. The fact that that would still be crossing the picket line, how realistic any of that is, or how genuine the offer, are all great questions/observations, but "replace with AI" seems like a quite dishonest editorialization in any case.
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  If editorialization is ever appropriate, this feels to me like the right time. Substantively, Perplexity make LLM tools - that's all they advertise on their website and what they are known for. Maybe they do have some jack-of-all-trade engineers who could turn their hands to web development or something, but there are also no doubt cleaners working at Perplexity. They aren't offering the New York Times help with the toilets!
  - morpheuskafka 2y ago
    But the article writers at NYT aren’t on strike—-as they’re in a diff bargaining unit with a contract and no-strike clause. The only way having AI write articles would help is if it freed up working staff to help out with tech stuff-—which they said they won’t do.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      I've found llm generated code to work amazingly well for visualisation since you can just look and check you're getting the right results.
    - seabass-labrax 2y ago
      Thank you for pointing that out; I missed it myself. That would imply that Perplexity's offer probably isn't even helpful in this situation, and it rather proves lxgr's point about TechCrunch's editorialization! It seems that the original journalist has made a correction: > Though TechCrunch asked Perplexity for comment, Srinivas responded to TechCrunch’s post on X saying that “the offer was not to ‘replace’ journalists or engineers with AI but to provide technical infra support on a high-traffic day.” The striking workers in question, however, are the ones who provide that service to the NYT. It’s not really clear what services other than AI tools Perplexity could offer, or why they would not amount to replacing the workers in question. (However, in response to the clarification, we have opted to change the headline to reflect the claim that this offer was not necessarily specific to AI services.)
- benatkin 2y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily either-or. If he had the time to personally write the tweet, I think he would be willing to lend some engineers to help get them set up with their services.

lxgr 2y ago

> That sounds liking replacing striking staff to me That's my read too, but they could also e.g. lend them some engineers, have them build an election dashboard for them etc. The fact that that would still be crossing the picket line, how realistic any of that is, or how genuine the offer, are all great questions/observations, but "replace with AI" seems like a quite dishonest editorialization in any case.

seabass-labrax 2y ago
If editorialization is ever appropriate, this feels to me like the right time. Substantively, Perplexity make LLM tools - that's all they advertise on their website and what they are known for. Maybe they do have some jack-of-all-trade engineers who could turn their hands to web development or something, but there are also no doubt cleaners working at Perplexity. They aren't offering the New York Times help with the toilets!
- morpheuskafka 2y ago
  But the article writers at NYT aren’t on strike—-as they’re in a diff bargaining unit with a contract and no-strike clause. The only way having AI write articles would help is if it freed up working staff to help out with tech stuff-—which they said they won’t do.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    I've found llm generated code to work amazingly well for visualisation since you can just look and check you're getting the right results.
  - seabass-labrax 2y ago
    Thank you for pointing that out; I missed it myself. That would imply that Perplexity's offer probably isn't even helpful in this situation, and it rather proves lxgr's point about TechCrunch's editorialization! It seems that the original journalist has made a correction: > Though TechCrunch asked Perplexity for comment, Srinivas responded to TechCrunch’s post on X saying that “the offer was not to ‘replace’ journalists or engineers with AI but to provide technical infra support on a high-traffic day.” The striking workers in question, however, are the ones who provide that service to the NYT. It’s not really clear what services other than AI tools Perplexity could offer, or why they would not amount to replacing the workers in question. (However, in response to the clarification, we have opted to change the headline to reflect the claim that this offer was not necessarily specific to AI services.)
benatkin 2y ago
I don't think it's necessarily either-or. If he had the time to personally write the tweet, I think he would be willing to lend some engineers to help get them set up with their services.