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Perplexity Deep Research

perplexity.ai

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Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#101

Post by Kye »

CjHuber wrote: post #93
TeMPOraL wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini was also "use us through this weird interface and also you can't if you're in the EU"; that + being far behind OpenAI and Anthropic for the past year means, they failed to reach notoriety, partly because of their own choices.

Honestly I don‘t get why everybody is saying Gemini is far behind. Like for me Gemini Flash Thinking Experimental performs far far better then o3 mini

It varies a lot for me. One day it takes scattered documents, pasted in, and produces a flawless summary I can use to organize it all. The next, it barely manages a paragraph for detailed input. It does seem like Google is quick to respond to feedback. I never seem to run into the same problem twice.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#102

Post by Kye »

qingcharles wrote: post #18
simonw wrote: post #7

That's the third product to use "Deep Research" in its name. The first was Gemini Deep Research: https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-deep-resea... - December 11th 2024 Then ChatGPT Deep Research: https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/ - February 2nd 2025 Now Perplexity Deep Research: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-perplexity-de... - February 14th 2025.

It failed my first test which concerned Upside magazine. All of these deep research versions have failed to immediately surface the most famous and controversial article from that magazine, "The Pussification of Silicon Valley." When hinted, Perplexity did a fantastic job of correcting itself, the others struggled terribly. I shouldn't have to hint though, as that requires domain knowledge that the asker of a query m…

My standard prompts when I want thoroughness:

"Did you miss anything?"

"Can you fact check this?"

"Does this accurately reflect the range of opinions on the subject?"

Taking the output to another LLM with the same questions can wring out more details.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#103

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #31

Are there good benchmarks for this type of tool? It seems not? Also, I'd compare with the output of phind (with thinking and multiple searches selected).

I’ve seen at least one deep-research replicator claiming they were the “best open deep research” tool on the GAIA benchmark: https://huggingface.co/papers/2311.12983 This is not a perfect benchmark but the closest I’ve seen.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#105

Post by acka »

freehorse wrote: post #92
qingcharles wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild. My results are literally dozens of posts about the article. https://imgur.com/a/1hTJVkl

About the article, not any link to the article itself.

It is possible that the original article is no longer accessible online.

The only link I have found is a reproduction of the article[1], but I am unable to access the full text due to a paywall. I no longer have access to academic resources or library memberships that would provide access.

My Google search query was:

    pussification of silicon valley inurl:upside
which returned exactly one result.

I suspect the article's low visibility in standard Google searches, requiring operators like 'inurl:', might be because its PageRank is low due to insufficient backlinks.

[1] https://www.proquest.com/docview/217963807?sourcetype=Trade%...

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#106

Post by rr808 »

exclipy wrote: post #51
alexvitkov wrote: post #50

Every week we get a new AI that according to the AI-goodness-benchmarks is 20% better than the old AI, yet the utility of these latest SOTA models is only marginally higher than the first ChatGPT version released to the public a few years back. These things have the reasoning skills of a toddler, yet we keep fine-tuning their writing style to be more and more authoritative - this one is only missing the font and colo…

Not true at all. The original ChatGPT was useless other than as a curious entertainment app. Perplexity, OTOH, has almost completely replaced Google for me now. I'm asking it dozens of questions per day, all for free because that's how cheap it is for them to run. The emergence of reliable tool use last year is what has sky-rocketed the utility of LLMs. That has made search and multi-step agents feasible, and by exte…

> all for free because that's how cheap it is for them to run.

No, these AI companies are burning through huge amounts of cash to keep the thing running. They're competing for market share - the real question is will anyone ever pay for this? I'm not convinced they will.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#107

Post by rr808 »

bsaul wrote: post #76

can someone explain what perplexity value is ? They seem like a thin wrapper on top of big AI names, and yet i find them often mentioned as equivalent to the likes of opena ai / anthropic / etc, which build foundational models. It's very confusing.

They are a little bit different because it operates more like a search tool. Its the first real company that is a good replacement for Google.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#108

Post by senko »

alexvitkov wrote: post #55
exclipy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true at all. The original ChatGPT was useless other than as a curious entertainment app. Perplexity, OTOH, has almost completely replaced Google for me now. I'm asking it dozens of questions per day, all for free because that's how cheap it is for them to run. The emergence of reliable tool use last year is what has sky-rocketed the utility of LLMs. That has made search and multi-step agents feasible, and by exte…

If your goal is to replace one unreliable source of information (Google first page) with another, sure - we may be there. I'd argue the GPT 3.5 already outperformed Google for a significant number of queries. The only difference between then and now is that now the context window is large enough that we can afford to paste into the prompt what we hope are a few relevant files. Yet what's essentially "cat [62 random f…

> Yet what's essentially "cat [62 random files we googled] > prompt.txt" is now being confidently presented with academic language as "62 sources".

That's not a very charitable take.

I recently quizzed Perplexity (Pro) on a niche political issue in my niche country, and it compared favorably with a special purpose-built RAG on exactly that news coverage (it was faster and more fluent, info content was the same). As I am personally familiar with these topics I was able to manually verify that both were correct.

Outside these tests I haven't used Perplexity a lot yet, but so far it does look capable of surfacing relevant and correct info.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#109

Post by 2099miles »

transformi wrote: post #10
simonw wrote: post #7

That's the third product to use "Deep Research" in its name. The first was Gemini Deep Research: https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-deep-resea... - December 11th 2024 Then ChatGPT Deep Research: https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/ - February 2nd 2025 Now Perplexity Deep Research: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-perplexity-de... - February 14th 2025.

You forgot Huggingface researchers - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/hugging-face-resea... and BTW - I post an exact same spirit comment an hour ago... So I guess Today's copycat ethics aren't solely for products- but also for comment section . LOL.

Your comment from earlier wasn’t as easy to digest as this one. I don’t think that person copied you at all.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#110

Post by TeMPOraL »

CjHuber wrote: post #93
TeMPOraL wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini was also "use us through this weird interface and also you can't if you're in the EU"; that + being far behind OpenAI and Anthropic for the past year means, they failed to reach notoriety, partly because of their own choices.

Honestly I don‘t get why everybody is saying Gemini is far behind. Like for me Gemini Flash Thinking Experimental performs far far better then o3 mini

It was far behind. That's what I kept hearing on the Internet until maybe a couple weeks ago, and it didn't seem like a controversial view. Not that I cared much - I couldn't access it anyway because I am in the EU, which is my main point here: it seems that they've improved recently, but at that point, hardly anyone here paid it any attention.

Now, as we can finally access it, Google has a chance to get back into the race.

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