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Perplexity Deep Research

perplexity.ai

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Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#161

Post by dang »

stagger87 wrote: post #33
esafak wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are a bit behind. All the "deep research" tools, and paid AI search tools in general, combine LLMs with search. When I do research on you.com it routinely searches a 100 sites. Even Google searches get Gemini'd now. I had to chuckle because your very link provides a demonstration.

> You are a bit behind. Quite the opposite. I'm familiar enough with these systems to know that asking the question "List the college majors of all Fortune 100 CEOs" is not going to get you a correct answer, Gemini and you.com included. I am happy to be proven wrong. :)

If you know more than others, it would be great to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Comments that only declare how much you know, without sharing any of it, are less useful, and ultimately off-topic.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#162

Post by daveguy »

This seems like magic, but I can't find a research paper that explains how it works. And "expert-level analysis across a range of complex subject matters." is quite the promise. Does anyone have a link to a research paper that describes how they achieve such a feat? Any experts compared deep research to known domains? I would appreciate accounts from existing experts on how they perform.

In the meantime, I hope the bean counters are keeping track of revenue vs LLM use.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#163

Post by tomaskafka »

daveguy wrote: post #162

This seems like magic, but I can't find a research paper that explains how it works. And "expert-level analysis across a range of complex subject matters." is quite the promise. Does anyone have a link to a research paper that describes how they achieve such a feat? Any experts compared deep research to known domains? I would appreciate accounts from existing experts on how they perform. In the meantime, I hope the b…

I tried it on a number of topics I care about. It’s definitely more “an intern clicking every link on first two pages of google search, unable to discern what’s important and what’s spam” than promised “expert level analysis”.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#164

Post by dleink »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #148
alexvitkov wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perplexity with Deepseek R1 (they have the real thing running on Amazon servers in USA) is a game changer, it doesn’t just use top results from a Google search, it considers what domains to search for information relevant to your prompt. I boycotted ai for about a year considering it to be mostly garbage but I’m back to perplexifying basically everything I need an answer fo (That said, I agree with you they’re not re…

I'd love to read something on how Perplexity+R1 integrates sources into the reasoning part.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#165

Post by eth0up »

anonu wrote: post #119
eth0up wrote: post #11

[flagged]

Came here to upvote you for the laughs.

It's soothing relief to find evidence suggesting the readership here is not entirely the unwavering legion of consummate humorless borgs so fervently conveyed. That there might be an organic human among them hints at mercy within the simulation. I'm not sure what laughing is, but I'm glad to facilitate it so long as it remains a victimless crime.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#166

Post by NeatoJn »

Tried a trending topic, I must say the output is quite underwhelming. It went through many "reasoning and searching" steps however the final write-up was still shallow descriptive texts, covering all aspects but no emphasis on the most important part.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#167

Post by psytrancefan »

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…

This is my first time using anything from Perplexity and I am liking this quite a bit.

There seems to be such variance in the utility people find with these models. I think it is the way Feynman wouldn't find much value in what the language model says on quantum electrodynamics but neither would my mom.

I suspect there is a sweet spot of ignorance and curiosity.

Deep Research seems to be reading a bunch of arXiv papers for me, combining the results and then giving me the references. Pretty incredible.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#168

Post by zeta_ »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #153
rr808 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What about ChatGPT's search functionality? Built straight in to the product. Works with GPT-4o.

They existed before OpenAI released that and they allow the use of other models like Claud or DeepSeek for example

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#169

Post by baxtr »

numba888 wrote: post #157
baxtr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You didn't expect it to do all the job for you on PhD level, did you? You did? Hmm.. ;) They are not there yet but getting closer. Quite a progress for 3 years.

No :) the prompt was about a marketing strategy for an app. It was very generic and it got the category of the app completely wrong to begin with.

But I admit that I didn’t spend huge amount of time designing the prompt.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#170

Post by masmm »

mrtesthah wrote: post #9
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.

Elicit AI just rolled out a similar feature, too, specifically for analyzing scientific research papers: https://support.elicit.com/en/articles/4168449

I find it better for my phd topic actually. Its paper recommendations are quite well.
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