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Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

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Re: Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

#91

Post by Wheaties466 »

Aurornis wrote: post #54
tuesdaynight wrote: post #7

These marketing stunts from Perplexity made me stop using their product. For me, it's an indicator that they don't believe in their product, so there's no reason for me to do it either.

I've tried to use Perplexity after reading all of the hype, seeing it praised by so many VCs, and seeing it appear on so many different lists of essential AI tools. Yet most of my Perplexity queries have produced poor results. It always feels like they optimized for minimizing latency and producing output that feels good instead of doing actual research. Most of the time it feels like the same quality of results I'd…

It sounds like you need to be using the research function, which takes ~3 minutes but does a much more in depth search to find more relevant data.

Re: Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

#92

Post by Hamuko »

riku_iki wrote: post #13

Why would they pay so much money for Chrome? They could just fork chromium for free? 34B is just for web address?

>We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences. We see continued evidence that Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing their source ASNs to hide their crawling activity, as well as ignoring — or sometimes failing to even fetch — robots.txt files.

Yeah, I'm sure that Perplexity would only have noble ideas in mind if the acquire a piece of software that is installed on >60% of the web-browsing population and automatically updates in the background.

Re: Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

#93

Post by Wheaties466 »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #61
Aurornis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried to use Perplexity after reading all of the hype, seeing it praised by so many VCs, and seeing it appear on so many different lists of essential AI tools. Yet most of my Perplexity queries have produced poor results. It always feels like they optimized for minimizing latency and producing output that feels good instead of doing actual research. Most of the time it feels like the same quality of results I'd…

Really? I’ve found it to be a fantastic product, and a part of my daily use. It’s reduced my legacy search engine usage significantly. Is there a better product? ChatGPT with web search enabled? I guess Google’s AI is probably good, I just haven’t used Google in a while as I switched to DuckDuckGo.

I completely agree. I also love the transparency that it provides as to where it is getting the reasoning for making a specific claim.

I can also ask it to just reference research papers and it will find relevant data relating to my query from peer reviewed sources.

Re: Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

#94

Post by nicce »

mrweasel wrote: post #89
nicce wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that it works with browsers. Otherwise web standards will not progress very well, since everyone tries to support the first Chrome version for their website. We create even more friction than having different browsers already has.

My take is the reverse. It would slow down development of web standard, which is a good thing, and allow competitors to develop and catch up. We want more browser engines, and slowing down development, e.g. to yearly, every two, or every three year for major releases would go a long way to ensure that.

> We want more browser engines, and slowing down development, e.g. to yearly, every two, or every three year for major releases would go a long way to ensure that.

Maybe you forget why we want more browser engines? It is not that we want the same standards rewritten differently. We want more competition, so that we get new ideas and alternatives. Maybe others don't have to catch up, since some standards or practices are currently dictated by Google and not seen as good in general.

Re: Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

#95

Post by glitchcrab »

scrumper wrote: post #75
Esophagus4 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I’ve found it to be a fantastic product, and a part of my daily use. It’s reduced my legacy search engine usage significantly. Is there a better product? ChatGPT with web search enabled? I guess Google’s AI is probably good, I just haven’t used Google in a while as I switched to DuckDuckGo.

I second this. Perplexity is the only AI I actually pay for. It absolutely excels at the kind of deep search into narrow domains where expertise is concentrated in forums and specialist sites. Things like mechanical work on obscure classic vehicles, vacuum tube electronics, company tax arcana. It's also very very good at those questions you sometimes wake up with, where something happened in the news six months ago a…

Couldn't agree more with this. A stock I hold suddenly started trending sharply upwards earlier in the year and when I asked Perplexity to research why it came back with a very detailed and well-cited explanation. It's far more efficient at distilling stuff down into a useful format than if I were to Google it myself

Re: Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

#96

Post by lo_zamoyski »

sofixa wrote: post #87
viccis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My tax dollars are already funding genocide, so for like 10 cents to go towards Yandex a month, of which some fraction goes towards Russia's quixotic war effort (which is an international crime but not a genocide in intent or effect), is not something that's gonna keep me up at night. Almost every other purchase I make comes with harm roughly commensurate with that of Kagi. The damage to the environment Perplexity an…

> which is an international crime but not a genocide in intent or effect) Why not? Russia has kidnapped hundreds of thousands of children, gives them for adoption to Russians, and claims that Ukrainians are just confused Russians. If it smells like a genocide, fits the definition of genocide... it's a genocide. > The damage to the environment Perplexity and Google (and Kagi) cause with unnecessary AI usage is a much…

Historically interesting note: Nazi Germany kidnapped thousands and thousands of Polish children and handed them to German parents to be raised as Germans. Their decedents usually don't even know about this.

Back to the topic at hand: you have to distinguish between material and formal cooperation with evil. I don't know the Kagi situation (if they're just indexing images for Yandex to improve search results, then I don't see how you have a real case here; even calling this remote cooperation with evil -- something that is generally impossible to avoid -- seems like a stretch). But let's say a company is doing something like making financial contributions to some organization doing something immoral. While you can boycott a company for that reason, you are not generally morally obligated to do so. And in practice, it usually has no effect. It's also unjust to saddle people with a burden of guilt they do not actually have. This is called rigorism.

Re: Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

#97

Post by xmprt »

Wheaties466 wrote: post #91
Aurornis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried to use Perplexity after reading all of the hype, seeing it praised by so many VCs, and seeing it appear on so many different lists of essential AI tools. Yet most of my Perplexity queries have produced poor results. It always feels like they optimized for minimizing latency and producing output that feels good instead of doing actual research. Most of the time it feels like the same quality of results I'd…

It sounds like you need to be using the research function, which takes ~3 minutes but does a much more in depth search to find more relevant data.

3 minutes is too long for exploratory searches, where I'm not sure what I'm even looking for. And 3 minutes feels too short for deep research which I'm expected to trust some complex result which I either don't know enough about myself (that's why I'm searching for it) or know enough about to the point that AI probably can't do something that I already couldn't within a couple minutes.

I think the sweet spot for AI results is around 10-30 seconds. It's fast enough that I'm willing to wait for the results even if I'm not sure I'm exploring the right topic. And it's also fast enough that even if I knew what to search for, it can give me summarized results faster than I could read on my own.

Re: Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

#98

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

sofixa wrote: post #64
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless Google is banned from providing a browser entirely, they'll just re-fork Webkit and release another browser, and it will very quickly replace Chrome usage. Especially on Android - which is the most used OS in the world. It seems strange to ban Google from offering a Search Engine, when all the other big tech companies can get into any field just fine, but the legal system is primarily a weapon for corruption t…

> Especially on Android - which is the most used OS in the world. In the EU, they're forced to ask you which browser and which search engine you want. > It seems strange to ban Google from offering a Search Engine, when all the other big tech companies can get into any field just fine, but the legal system is primarily a weapon for corruption these days, so who knows. Letting one instance of blatant anti competitive…

And in the EU, there's little difference in Chrome & Google market share on Android.

It's almost as if people actually like Google's products.

Re: Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

#99

Post by __rito__ »

Aurornis wrote: post #54
tuesdaynight wrote: post #7

These marketing stunts from Perplexity made me stop using their product. For me, it's an indicator that they don't believe in their product, so there's no reason for me to do it either.

I've tried to use Perplexity after reading all of the hype, seeing it praised by so many VCs, and seeing it appear on so many different lists of essential AI tools. Yet most of my Perplexity queries have produced poor results. It always feels like they optimized for minimizing latency and producing output that feels good instead of doing actual research. Most of the time it feels like the same quality of results I'd…

Hard disagree.

Even during ChatGPT peak, when HN was buzzing with every other post being how ChatGPT/other LLM product replaced Google for them, I could not honestly switch, or meaningfully reduce my Google usage.

Until Perplexity.

It was the AI product that actually reduced my Google usage. Even with AI mode directly built into Google homepage now, Perplexity is still better.

It has basically zero hallucination, each para/entry backed by a URL, and lower latentcy than any other LLM product.

I don't know why you find it bad. I use it daily, and for serious searches.

It has fundamentally changed the way I search the web/ask questions in the web.

Re: Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome

#100

Post by lo_zamoyski »

viraptor wrote: post #82
TiredOfLife wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"directly" does not mean 3 steps removed. (Kagi-yandex-taxes-military)

"Remote material cooperation with evil" at best, which implicates virtually all human action. There is nothing immoral here. It's direct or formal cooperation that you need to worry about.
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