Google may have a new competitor and it’s not OpenAI. Instead, it could be Perplextiy, which styles itself as an answer engine, not a search engine.
Explains Tech.co:
“Perplexity AI is an AI-powered conversational search engine that produces concise answers to user-generated queries. The technology utilizes LLMs like GPT-4, Claude, Mistral Large, and its own custom models for natural language processing, and searches the web in real-time to provide users with up-to-date answers.
Perplexity AI is quite literally the lovechild of Google Search and ChatGPT. The app was founded in 2022 by former Google and Open AI employees, who were frustrated by the wasted potential of the LLMs they were developing. The team wanted to make the information these models contain more accessible to the public, helping to ‘democratize access to knowledge’ as a result.
The team chose the name Perplexity because they want the platform to help users gain accurate and informative answers to questions, even if they’re complex or challenging.”
Adds Forbes:
“Instead of entering keywords and sorting through a tangle of links, users pose their questions directly to Perplexity.ai and receive concise, accurate answers backed up by a curated set of sources. Powered by large language models (LLMs), this ‘answer engine’ places users, not advertisers, at its center. This shift promises to transform how we discover, access, and consume knowledge online—and, with that, the structure of the internet as we know it today.”
You can check out a video of it below:
Personally, I’m all for democratizing knowledge and if we can improve search, removing the focus on advertisers, then all the better. I just think that it’s more likely that interacting with conversational chatbots like ChatGPT is what ultimately winds up replacing traditional search engines like Google since they have first movers advantageg and will be getting integrated into iPhones soon.
However, Perplexity’s new Pages tool could stand on its own enabling users to create entire Wikipedia style webpages on any topic from a single prompt. If you’re looking to build out a website or create material for a presentation this could be a fast and easy way to do it.
Either way it’s clear that there’s a new player in the knowledge space. One that aims to make use of all the information that’s already online. So, if you get a chance you may want to consider trying out an answer engine instead of a search engine the next time you want to find something out.
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Is Perplexity the Greatest Idea Ever?
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