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I second this. Perplexity is the only AI I actually pay for. It absolutely excels at the kind of deep search into narrow domains where expertise is concentrated

I second this. Perplexity is the only AI I actually pay for. It absolutely excels at the kind of deep search into narrow domains where expertise is concentrated in forums and specialist sites. Things like mechanical work on obscure classic vehicles, vacuum tube electronics, company tax arcana. It's also very very good at those questions you sometimes wake up with, where something happened in the news six months ago and you think, "Whatever came of that?" Its deep research and Pro modes are great at synthesizing thorough briefings on complex topics too, to get up to speed on a new client or job responsibility for example. It's not a chatbot for me, it's a brilliant, tireless little research minion. As always with any LLM you should double-check its final, specific answers. It does occasionally hallucinate when information simply isn't available. Your research minion is just that - a minion, you have to have the context. It's not a teacher or guru. EDIT: the bottom line is, it came along at exactly the right time for me. Google's search results are pages of ads, and DuckDuckGo insists on showing page after page of content-farm blogspam for the types of topics I search for. It cuts right through all that crap for me.

glitchcrab 1y ago
Couldn't agree more with this. A stock I hold suddenly started trending sharply upwards earlier in the year and when I asked Perplexity to research why it came back with a very detailed and well-cited explanation. It's far more efficient at distilling stuff down into a useful format than if I were to Google it myself
tzs 1y ago
> As always with any LLM you should double-check its final, specific answers. It does occasionally hallucinate when information simply isn't available. It also sometimes completely botches it when information is available. For example a while back someone cited Musk only scoring 730 on the math SAT as evidence that there is something from with the test. I looked up Musk's age to figure out about when he would have taken the SAT then asked Perplexity what percentile a 760 would have been then. It gave me an answer that as far as I can tell was right (~90th). I then wondered what my percentile was, so asked it what percentile 790 would have been when I took it. It told me it would have been 17.something, where that something had 5 digits. That was obviously completely wrong because (1) there is no possible way it could have data that would justify giving an answer with 5 digits after the decimal point, and (2) the maximum possible score was 800 and scores were a multiple of 10, so for 790 to have been 17th percentile would mean that 83% of people who took the test scored a perfect 800. I told it that this was clearly absurd. It responded that I was completely right and said it was going to try again. On the retry it gave a reasonable answer that I knew from what I remembered was in the right ballpark and not given to ridiculous accuracy.
Esophagus4 1y ago
The SEO-optimized blog spam is the worst. Each page has paragraphs and paragraphs of pure filler. Let the AI crawlers read them so I don’t have to.

glitchcrab 1y ago

Couldn't agree more with this. A stock I hold suddenly started trending sharply upwards earlier in the year and when I asked Perplexity to research why it came back with a very detailed and well-cited explanation. It's far more efficient at distilling stuff down into a useful format than if I were to Google it myself

tzs 1y ago

> As always with any LLM you should double-check its final, specific answers. It does occasionally hallucinate when information simply isn't available. It also sometimes completely botches it when information is available. For example a while back someone cited Musk only scoring 730 on the math SAT as evidence that there is something from with the test. I looked up Musk's age to figure out about when he would have taken the SAT then asked Perplexity what percentile a 760 would have been then. It gave me an answer that as far as I can tell was right (~90th). I then wondered what my percentile was, so asked it what percentile 790 would have been when I took it. It told me it would have been 17.something, where that something had 5 digits. That was obviously completely wrong because (1) there is no possible way it could have data that would justify giving an answer with 5 digits after the decimal point, and (2) the maximum possible score was 800 and scores were a multiple of 10, so for 790 to have been 17th percentile would mean that 83% of people who took the test scored a perfect 800. I told it that this was clearly absurd. It responded that I was completely right and said it was going to try again. On the retry it gave a reasonable answer that I knew from what I remembered was in the right ballpark and not given to ridiculous accuracy.

Esophagus4 1y ago

The SEO-optimized blog spam is the worst. Each page has paragraphs and paragraphs of pure filler. Let the AI crawlers read them so I don’t have to.