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Perplexity Deep Research

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Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#131

Post by season2episode3 »

calebkaiser wrote: post #122
rr808 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The question of "will people pay" is answered--OpenAI alone is at something like $4 billion in ARR. There are also smaller players (relatively) with impressive revenue, many of whom are profitable. There are plenty of open questions in the AI space around unit economics, defensibility, regulatory risks, and more. "Will people pay for this" isn't one of them.

As someone who loves OpenAI’s products, I still have to say that if you’re paying $200/month for this stuff then you’ve been taken for a ride.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#132

Post by rchaud »

ibeff wrote: post #78
caseyy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best practical benchmark I found is asking LLMs to research or speak on my field of expertise.

That's what I did. It came up with smart-sounding but infeasible recommendations because it took all sources it found online at face value without considering who authored them for what reason. And it lacked a massive amount of background knowledge to evaluate the claims made in the sources. It took outlandish, utopian demands by some activists in my field and sold them to me as things that might plausibly be impleme…

> It took outlandish, utopian demands by some activists in my field and sold them to me as things that might plausibly be implemented in the near future.

Reminds me of when Altman went to TSMC and bloviated about chip fabs to subject matter experts: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-execs-allege...

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#133

Post by calebkaiser »

season2episode3 wrote: post #131
calebkaiser wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question of "will people pay" is answered--OpenAI alone is at something like $4 billion in ARR. There are also smaller players (relatively) with impressive revenue, many of whom are profitable. There are plenty of open questions in the AI space around unit economics, defensibility, regulatory risks, and more. "Will people pay for this" isn't one of them.

As someone who loves OpenAI’s products, I still have to say that if you’re paying $200/month for this stuff then you’ve been taken for a ride.

Yeah, I'm skeptical about the price point of that particular product as well.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#134

Post by tim333 »

hansworst wrote: post #129
DebtDeflation wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of mental inertia combined with an extremely fast moving market. Google was behind in the AI race in 2023 and a good chunk of 2024. But they largely caught up with Gemini 1.5, especially the 002 release version. Now with Gemini 2 they are every bit as much of a frontier model player as OpenAI and Anthropic, and even ahead of them in a few areas. 2025 will be an interesting year for AI.

Arguably Google is ahead. They have many non-llm uses (waymo/deepmind etc) and they have their own hardware, so not as reliant on Nvidia.

Demis Hassabis isn't very promotional. The other guys make more noise.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#135

Post by jaggs »

tr3ntg wrote: post #96
CjHuber wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seconding this. I get really great results from Flash 2.0 and even Pro 1.5 for some things compared to OpenAI models. And their 2.0 Thinking model is great for other things. When my task matters, I default to Gemini.

I find the problem with Gemini is the rate limits. Really constrictive.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#136

Post by jaggs »

Kye wrote: post #101
CjHuber wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've found this as well. On a good day Gemini is superb. But otherwise, awful. Really weird.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#137

Post by jaggs »

baxtr wrote: post #71
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…

Just yesterday I did my first Deep Research with OpenAI on a topic I know well. I have to say I am really underwhelmed. It sounds all authoritative and the structure is good. It all sounds and feels substantial on the surface but the content is really poor. Now people will blame me and say: you have to get the prompt right! Maybe. But then at the very least put a disclaimer on your highly professional sounding dossie…

I think what some people are finding is it's producing superficially good results, but there are actually no decent 'insights' integrated with the words. In other words, it's just a super search on steroids. Which is kind of disappointing?

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#138

Post by jaggs »

rchaud wrote: post #130
rr808 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> They're competing for market share - the real question is will anyone ever pay for this? The leadership of every 'AI' company will be looking to go public and cash out well before this question ever has to be answered. At this point, we all know the deal. Once they're publicly traded, the quality of the product goes to crap while fees get ratcheted up every which way.

That's when the 'enshitification' engine kicks in. Pop up ads on every result page etc. It's not going to be pretty.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#139

Post by Lws803 »

Curious to hear folks thoughts about Gergely's (The Pragmatic Engineer) tweet though https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1891084838469308593

I do wonder if this will push web publishers to start pay-walling up. I think the economics for deep research or AI search in general don't add up. Web publishers and site owners are losing traffic and human eyeballs from their site.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#140

Post by vic_nyc »

pgwhalen wrote: post #120
vic_nyc wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's been using OpenAI's ChatGPT every day for work, I tested Perplexity's free Deep Research feature today and I was blown away by how good it is. It's unlike anything I've seen over at OpenAI and have tested all of their models. I have canceled my OpenAI monthly subscription.

What did you ask it that blew you away? Every time I see a comment about someone getting excited about some new AI thing, I want to go try and see for myself, but I can't think of a real world use case that is the right level of difficulty that would impress me.

I asked it to expand an article with further information about the topic, and it searched online and that’s what it did.
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