Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I’ve found it to be a fantastic product, and a part of my daily use. It’s reduced my legacy search engine usage significantly. Is there a better product? ChatGPT with web search enabled? I guess Google’s AI is probably good, I just haven’t used Google in a while as I switched to DuckDuckGo.
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 a…
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.