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Perplexity Deep Research

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Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#51

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 extension applications like Deep Research.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#52
post #51

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…

Yeah, I don't get OPs take. ChatGPT 3.5 was basically just a novelty, albeit an exciting one. The models we've gotten since have ingrained themselves into my workflows as productivity multipliers. They are significantly better and more useful (and multimodal) than what we had in 2022, not just marginally better.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#54

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…

I use these models to aid bleeding edge ml research every day. Sonnet can make huge changes and bug fixes to my code (that does stuff nobody else has tried in this way before) whereas GPT 3.5 Turbo couldn’t even repeat a given code block without dropping variables and breaking things. O1 can reason through very complex model designs and signal processing stuff even I have a hard time wrapping my head around.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#55
post #51

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…

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 files we googled] > prompt.txt" is now being confidently presented with academic language as "62 sources". This rubs me the wrong way. Maybe this time the new AI really is so much better than the old AI that it justifies using that sort of language, but I've seen this pattern enough times that I can be confident that's not the case.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#56

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…

[deleted]

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#58
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.

Just a side note: The Wikipedia page for "Deep Research" only mentions OpenAI – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Research

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#59
post #54

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…

I use these models to aid bleeding edge ml research every day. Sonnet can make huge changes and bug fixes to my code (that does stuff nobody else has tried in this way before) whereas GPT 3.5 Turbo couldn’t even repeat a given code block without dropping variables and breaking things. O1 can reason through very complex model designs and signal processing stuff even I have a hard time wrapping my head around.

On the other hand, if you try to solve some problem by creating the code by using AI only, and it misses only one thing, it takes more time to debug this problem rather than creating this code from scratch. Understanding some larger piece of AI code is sometimes equally hard or harder than constructing the solution into your problem by yourself.

Re: Perplexity Deep Research

#60
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.

Just a side note: The Wikipedia page for "Deep Research" only mentions OpenAI – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Research

This is bizarre, wasn't Google the one who claimed the name and did it first?
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