Tried it and it is worse that OpenAI deep search (one query only, will need to try it more I guess...)
My query generated 17 steps of research, gathering 74 sources. I picked "Deep Research" from the modes, I almost accidentally picked "reasoning".
Perplexity Deep Research
81–90 of 180 posts
Re: Perplexity Deep Research
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
It failed my first test which concerned Upside magazine. All of these deep research versions have failed to immediately surface the most famous and controversial article from that magazine, "The Pussification of Silicon Valley." When hinted, Perplexity did a fantastic job of correcting itself, the others struggled terribly. I shouldn't have to hint though, as that requires domain knowledge that the asker of a query m…
> pussification of silicon valley upside magazine Google nor bing can find this
Do you have Google SafeSearch or Bing's equivalent turned on perhaps?
I reckon it might be triggered by the word 'pussification' to refuse to return any results related to that.
If you're using a corporate account, it's possible that your account manager has enabled SafeSearch, which you may not be able to disable.
Local censorship laws, such as those in South Korea, might also filter certain results.
Re: Perplexity Deep Research
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Gemini was also "use us through this weird interface and also you can't if you're in the EU"; that + being far behind OpenAI and Anthropic for the past year means, they failed to reach notoriety, partly because of their own choices.
Re: Perplexity Deep Research
#84can someone explain what perplexity value is ? They seem like a thin wrapper on top of big AI names, and yet i find them often mentioned as equivalent to the likes of opena ai / anthropic / etc, which build foundational models. It's very confusing.
Their main claim to fame was blending LLM+search well early on. Everyone has caught up on that one though. The other benefit is access to variety of models - OAI, Anthropic etc. i.e. you can select the LLM for each LLM+search you do.
Lately they've been making a string of moves thought that smell of desperation though.
Re: Perplexity Deep Research
#85It's great to see the foundation model companies having their product offerings commoditized so fast - we as the users definitely win. Unless you're applying to be an intern analyst of some type somewhere... good luck in the next few years. I'm just starting to wonder where we as the entrepreneurs end up fitting in. Every majorly useful app on top of LLMs has been done or is being done by the model companies: - RAG a…
This is tricky as I think it is uncertain. Right now the answer is user experience, customs workflows layered on top of the models and onboarding specific enterprises to use it.
If suddenly agentic stuff works really well... Then that breaks that world. I think there's a chance it won't though. I suspect it needs a substantial innovation, although bitter lesson indicates it just needs the right training data.
Anyway, if agents stay coherent, my startup not being needed any more would be the last of my worries. That puts us in singularity territory. If that doesn't cause huge other consequences, the answer is higher level businesses - so companies that make entire supply chains using AI to make each company in that chain. Much grander stuff.
But realistically at this point we are in the graphic novel 8 Billion Genies.
Re: Perplexity Deep Research
#86Every 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…
There were two step changes: ChatGPT/GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. Everything after feels incremental. But that's perhaps understandable. GPT-4 established just how many tasks could be done by such models: approximately anything that involves or could be adjusted to involve text. That was the categorical milestone that GPT-4 crossed. Everything else since then is about slowly increasing model capabilities, which translated to which tasks could then be done in practice, reliably, to acceptable standards. Gradual improvement is all that's left now.
Basically how progress of everything ever looks like.
The next huge jump will have to again make a qualitative change, such as enabling AI to handle a new class of tasks - tasks that fundamentally cannot be represented in text form in a sensible fashion.
Re: Perplexity Deep Research
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure Gemini had deep research before openai
Yes,see sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064111 . I think you will find a predecessor to most of OpenAIs interaction concepts. Also canvas was I guess inspired by other code copilots. I think their competence is rather being able to put tons of resources into it pushing it into the market in a usable way (while sometimes breaking things). Once OpenAI had it the rest feels like they now also hav…
Yes, OpenAI is the leader in the field in a literal sense: once they do something, everyone else quickly follows.
They also seem to ignore usurpers, like Anthroipic with their MCP. Anthropic succeeded in setting a direction there, which OpenAI did not follow, as I imagine following it would be a tacit admission of Anthropic's role as co-leader. That's in contrast to whatever e.g. Google is doing, because Google is not expressing right leadership traits, so they're not a reputational threat to OpenAI.
I feel that one of the biggest screwups by Google was to keep Gemini unavailable for EU until recently - there's a whole big population (and market) of people interested in using GenAI, arguably larger than the US, and the region-ban means we basically stopped caring about what Google is doing over a year ago already.
See also: Sora. After initial release, all interest seems to have quickly died down, and I wonder if this again isn't just because OpenAI keeps it unavailable for the EU.
Re: Perplexity Deep Research
#88Every 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…
There were two step changes: ChatGPT/GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. Everything after feels incremental. But that's perhaps understandable. GPT-4 established just how many tasks could be done by such models: approximately anything that involves or could be adjusted to involve text . That was the categorical milestone that GPT-4 crossed. Everything else since then is about slowly increasing model capabilities, which translated to…
But they are already multi-modal. The Google one can do live streaming video understanding with a conversational in-out prompt. You can literally walk around with your camera and just chat about the world. No text to be seen (although perhaps under the covers it is translating everything to text, but the point is the user sees no text)
Re: Perplexity Deep Research
#89It's interesting. Recently I came up with a question that I posted to different LLMs with different results. It's about the ratio between GDP (PPP adjusted) to general GDP. ChatGPT was good, but because it found a dedicated web page exactly with this data and comparison so just rephrased the answer. General perplexity.ai when asked hallucinated significantly showing Luxemburg as the leader and pointing to some random gdp-related resources. But this kind of perplexity gave a very good "research" on a prompt "I would like to research countries about the ratio between GDP adjusted to purchasing power and the universal GDP. Please, show the top ones and look for other regularities". Took about 3 minutes
Re: Perplexity Deep Research
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were two step changes: ChatGPT/GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. Everything after feels incremental. But that's perhaps understandable. GPT-4 established just how many tasks could be done by such models: approximately anything that involves or could be adjusted to involve text . That was the categorical milestone that GPT-4 crossed. Everything else since then is about slowly increasing model capabilities, which translated to…
But they are already multi-modal. The Google one can do live streaming video understanding with a conversational in-out prompt. You can literally walk around with your camera and just chat about the world. No text to be seen (although perhaps under the covers it is translating everything to text, but the point is the user sees no text)
Fair, but OpenAI was doing that half year ago (though limited access; I myself got it maybe a month ago), and I haven't seen it yet translate into anything in practice, so I feel like it (and multimodality in general) must be a GPT-3 level ability at this point.
But I do expect the next qualitative change to come from this area. It feels exactly like what is needed, but it somehow isn't there just yet.