And it's all because of ads. The incentives in an ad-funded internet are just always going to lead to this sort of thing. The most important thing is getting the user to load your page, not actually satisfying their query. Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits, because any that move to ad revenue will become useless for real work.
> And it's all because of ads. Not really. A while ago there was a news piece stating that Israel was behind a series of fake think-tanks with very accessible websites which were created with the express purpose of feeding AI agents with alternative facts aligned with their foreign policy. If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.
The irony of this article being fully AI generated... Anyway, it's over for Perplexity. They never had a great a product and the only reason for using them, was when they offered Pro accounts for free. Many people joined. Me included. But with a "meh" product and the general AI business not being very sticky, they lost quite harshly. I thought they might be able to make money as a search api/index, but this article c…
They were way above their main competition at the time Google decided to ignore the entire open web but they were still focused on searching it.
Since then, they decided to change focus into answering questions, and didn't maintain the quality of search results.
I used one of the 12-month free Perplexity offers when they were everywhere. It felt slightly useful at first for simple queries where I didn’t want to go through the top 10 Google results manually. If I was looking for a specific recipe I remembered or a help page or user manual it would usually find it quickly. Then they started optimizing for speed of responses over quality of results. I can enter a query and see…
I’ve personally found that Google’s AI mode is surprisingly capable and almost absurdly fast, although the hallucination rate is somewhat proportionally higher too to match its seeming over-responsiveness. Which means Perplexity in effect doesn’t have anything to differentiate it.
I don't notice it's hallucinations (in the sense of making up answers) so much as where it's simply wrong. For example, earlier in the week, I was working with product X, and since the original vendor of X doesn't really support it any more, I asked "who else sells product X under their own brand", and Google AI quickly told me that noone else sells product X, that it was full of proprietary tech and quickly devolved into replaying product X marketing spiel. Except...I knew that at least one other vendor did sell product X, only difference is paint job. After too much "no, you're wrong..." and "Yes, you're right...", it finally coughed up that there were 2 other vendors that sold it. And if I didn't already know about another vendor, I probably would still be putzing around with poor support and little documentation.
What protection do LLM search engines have against training off content generated by other LLMs? Will we get to a point where AI-generated sites make up a majority of the internet, and LLMs are training upon their own regurgitations, with exponential amplification of all their lies and flaws? Or will the pre-2022 corpus human knowledge be considered the low-background steel standard, and anything after that less and…
Will we get to a point where AI-generated sites make up a majority of the internet
I dunno if they'll be the majority (I suspect we're alredy close to 'yes, and it's already happened'), but I feel very, very confident that they will be the majority, if not the totality, of sites that the vast majority of people see.
I've been vary of using ai to search considering all the spam out there. I think I'd rather, perhaps naively, whitelist wikipedia, reddit, arxiv, some news sources, etc than include everything. Is there nothing out there that does this? I'm paying for kagi and I can see that it has an api, is that maybe sufficient if configured properly?
If you use Kagi Assistant, you can pick one of your lenses (i.e. lists of domains to restrict searches to) in chats. Not sure if their API has that as well or some other way to restrict searches. Also not sure if the Assistant (or API) respects blocked domains when searching.
If you let a plain llm search the internet with no guidance, it's basically a string matcher with no concept of quality. I thought perplexity's whole point was being good at search?
I thought perplexity's whole point was being good at search?
Yes, and the whole point of the OP is they aren't.
Honestly, I will just flag every post that is entirely AI slop from now on. This has to stop. The home page for this "independent research firm" is also 100% nonsense [1]. "The record a machine reads is not the one a company writes.". Ironically this low-effort spam is exactly what this report warns about, and does not belong in HN - or anywhere else. [1] https://trellner.com/
Also, that user's last four (three of them in the last hour) submissions have all been similar "finding" reports from a Claude-generated mystery research group website. All which contain exclusively AI slop articles. Ugh.
I speculate pretty soon they won't even bother with a website meatbags can browse to. It'll all be fed by links to links to api endpoints that stream training data to push models in the desired direction.
Cool, but, uh, this seems really astroturfed? Why are there two anti-Perplexity articles from independent research firms with identical websites on the front-page of HN right now, submitted by the same person? Feels like they should get deleted
ugh. so hard to read these ai generated articles. am I the only one? and am I supposed to put my agent in front to read it, which just introduces noise - didn't anyone learn from that "telephone" game we played as children?
You don't get accurate signals asking an AI to represent your prose and another AI to understand it.