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Perplexity got ads

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Re: Perplexity got ads

#191

Post by masa331 »

wrasee wrote: post #173
chrisweekly wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Kagi is doing well, and I'm very happy to pay a few bucks a month to be their customer instead of their product.

Genuinely interested. So I went to their site and I have to say it's quite refreshing. But then - a few bucks a month turns out to be $5/month, and that comes with a limit of 300 searches/month. That's an average of just 10 a day and while in practice I probably wouldn't actually hit that limit it's uncomfortably low enough that the added fiction of each search having a tangible cost is just a non-starter. I can't he…

I also pay for Kagi and i'v never been happier with my searches. It's so nice not to have to slog through Google bullshit results. Kagi results are great and you can tweak the behaviour deeply to your liking. I'm also proud to support an alternative from a smaller company with same beliefs instead of Google who does a lot of damage to the medium i love be it ads or Chrome. So the few bucks are a no brainer. It's the same as paying for any other monthly subscription

Re: Perplexity got ads

#192

Post by tomjen3 »

ericd wrote: post #33

Just a reminder that you can run a fairly capable model like qwen2.5:72b locally on an 128 gig M4 Max Macbook Pro.

Or you could buy a slightly less insanely expensive model, split the savings in two, and get many many years of credits on OpenAI.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#193

Post by serial_dev »

formerlurker wrote: post #166
nomilk wrote: post #120

What are the advantages of Perplexity over, say, ChatGPT? I use three LLMs atm (ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok), and have a decent sense for which is better at different tasks. For example, when asked about questionable web scraping ChatGPT and Claude give answers regarding ethics, whereas Grok gives more direct, technical response. What is Perplexity better than other LLMs at?

I do not know about Perplexity because I avoid it. Instead, I prefer and pay for Claude over Perplexity because Claude offers actual privacy protections. All other services take in my data and use it to further train their models and that does not sit well with me because I had a stalker. It’s obvious that Perplexity is following the Google route of using people as products.

Just curious, what’s the connection between you avoiding services training their models based on your data, and you having had a stalker? What kind of stalkers you had to consider this an attack vector?

Re: Perplexity got ads

#195

Post by mojo74 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #40
consp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have neither and my life is better for it. I might pay for a decent streaming service but we've past the point where that is the case. I will never pay again for classic TV, it's a scam since you pay for more ads than actual content.

What could make a streaming service "decent" ?

I don't know where you're based but I would offer the BBC

TV - take your pick of classic shows. Radio - 6 music for me. Education - provides resources for all school key stages in line with the UK curriculum. Sports - a bit sporadic but you can get everything except baseball at some point in the year. Arts - broadcasts the Glastonbury festival. Live shows you can attend and be in the audience.

All for £170 a year and no ads.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#196

Post by edanm »

Tostino wrote: post #164
edanm wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very common sentiment on HN, but... why? I don't get it. It's not like there aren't people focused on sustainable businesses. 90% of businesses are probably SMBs - just not in tech. For most people in the world, the word entrepreneur means "someone who's opening a McDonalds across the street" or "someone opening a pizza shop". Even in tech, there are plenty of not-hypergrowth companies around (I run a small…

I'm not against using tech's natural advantages with scale - that's one of the beauties of software. My concern is with the disproportionate resources being poured into hyper-growth ventures, where the vast majority fail after burning through enormous amounts of capital. If even a fraction of that talent and investment was redirected toward building sustainable businesses that create real value, rather than just comp…

First, I think VC makes up a tiny percentage of invested capital, so I'm not sure the intuition of "so much money is thrown at it" is right. There's far, far more capital and talent in e.g. traditional non-software businesses, finance, government, etc. Just look at places like Google, which has 180k employees. Not all are tech/innovation talent, necessarily, but that's probably more than most new startups combined.

In any case, I'm not sure I trust you, me or anyone to be smarter about how to get innovation than our current relatively-free-market capitalistic system, where there's actually pretty good incentives to pursue innovation. Look at how many things today that absolutely improve our world have been created through this messy process. It's apparently monetarily worth it to have 95 failed startups in order to get 5 ones that change the world, and that's probably a good thing for society, because the world is better than it war 20 years ago in terms of technology/innovation.

(The world is worse in other ways, and a different criticism of tech is that some of it can also be negative for society, but that's a separate concern than it being wasteful, which I just don't agree with.)

Re: Perplexity got ads

#197

Post by woadwarrior01 »

rz2k wrote: post #115
coder543 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hundreds of thousands of people" are paying $20/mo for it, according to the CEO.[0] That seems like a very respectable place for such an early product to be. It is extremely far from "no one". [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWPmu_rKxJo&t=185s

I wonder if cross-examined on that claim, that he would clarify that they have hundreds of thousands of Pro customers. Something like: It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of how much Individual subscribers paid, but that is an accurate characterization of the number of Pro Perplexity subscribers. The point is, I have a Pro Perplexity subscription for a year, because my ISP was offering year long access for free. I thi…

OP has a point. Why is this being downvoted? In my neck of the woods (UK and Ireland), everyone I know using Perplexity Pro, got a free annual subscription with Revolut. Like OP, I tried it for a week and moved on.

Its citations are often bunkum and code generation abilities are very limited, compared to GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet, heck even tiny 4-bit quantized 14B local LLMs are way better at code generation (Qwen 2.5 Coder).

Re: Perplexity got ads

#198

Post by crowdyriver »

Genuine question, more for soloentrepreneurs, but what if instead of adding ads from other companies, the perplexity company did other paid products?

Then they could put a few non disruptive ads for those into their main free product, and they would make much more sense.

I want to apply this strategy into my (yet non existent) future products.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#199

Post by franga2000 »

omnicognate wrote: post #189
pembrook wrote: post #123

Big surprise. It’s almost as if internet 1.0 shook out the way it did for a reason, and for all the complaining about ads, fast forward 25 years and consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. It’s the same reason the phone book was also free and ad supported pre-internet. I don’t know why we can’t accept this reality and why we need to masochistically flog ourselves every time this is proven true over an…

I don't get your point. I pay for services wherever I can, including search and AI, and see few adverts online despite not using a blocker. The main source of ads I see is in news articles when following links from places like HN, which is because the news industry hasn't developed the microtransactions mechanism it would need to allow readers to pay while retaining the experience of being able to follow links freely…

I haven't heard many bad things about Youtube Premium on its own, besides all the jokes people were making back when it was called Youtube Red (hahah redtube...).

The way they seemingly randomly have a family plan in some countries but not in other is very annoying and the bundling of Youtube Music is problematic from a fair competition standpoint, but that's about it.

It's not that expensive for what you get, it removes ads which are the worst thing about Youtube and it ends us giving more money to the creators you watch compared to if you just watched the ads. What's not to like?

Re: Perplexity got ads

#200

Post by xigoi »

wrasee wrote: post #173
chrisweekly wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Kagi is doing well, and I'm very happy to pay a few bucks a month to be their customer instead of their product.

Genuinely interested. So I went to their site and I have to say it's quite refreshing. But then - a few bucks a month turns out to be $5/month, and that comes with a limit of 300 searches/month. That's an average of just 10 a day and while in practice I probably wouldn't actually hit that limit it's uncomfortably low enough that the added fiction of each search having a tangible cost is just a non-starter. I can't he…

According to Kagi, they can’t make the price much lower and still be profitable.
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