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Comment by kissgyorgy | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame because Perplexity is BY FAR the most useful AI tool out there. This shows they have clearly no vision and won't be able to keep afloat.

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I would have agreed up until a few weeks ago. ChatGPT search is getting better, but kind of superficial so I still preferred Perplexity. But the new Gemini Deep Research is waaay better than Perplexity at deeper Internet searches and I imagine only will continue to get better.

Perplexity is useful as a thin layer of product over a base model. As Sam Altman said, eventually all such startups will be steamrolled by companies that own the models.

Sam Altman is not a credible figure, and that quote was rubbish IMO. There’s no inherent reason that foundation model trainers (the dumb pipes of the AI era) will win RAG by default. Apps like Perplexity aren’t even really constrained by the strength of the model. The secret sauce is the information retrieval, where OpenAI has no special advantage. But Google sure does…

He might say that, but I think in fact the opposite is true. The models are getting commodified. The real value lies in distribution (access to customers) and consumer product skills.

Yeah, but the distributers are always depend on the models. And they'll have to pay their licenses. And the ones who control the model have quite an influence on all of us.

They don’t have to pay for licenses for open models. Although I’m not sure if Meta’s licenses have some sort of restriction on who can use it.

I have been using / fanboi'ing Perplexity since January 2022; overall, I am disappointed in the direction their product has been heading. While it is still the first URL I visit when I want apprentice-level help, I don't think this will be true for much longer.

If anybody at perplexity wants my more-direct feedback (beyond what I've submitted via your platform's conversations), my postal is listed in /hn/bio (I do not use email, so if your platform eventually `requires` this it's an immediate disusership from me dawg).

I'm pretty sure no one at Perplexity cares. That's my honest, genuine, sober impression based on my own experience.

I mean, thanks to llama/deepseek, the models are now essentially free.

Please explain why do you think they're the most useful by far? Just curious of such a bold statement in a highly competitive space.

Not OP but it used to be that if you wanted an LLM that would cite its sources - Perplexity was one of the only games in town that did a really good job combining an LLM with an active search engine.

It was also much better for posing questions that required the most up-to-date knowledge.

Why do you sound like a bot.

Probably because bots are trained to sound like people.

It starts with a search and reasoning from there. Cites the sources in the middle of the sentences so you can just click and verify, see the whole context.

It blows every "model only" service because it's 100x more accurate.

I use it instead of Google for every search now.

Search is the most if not only useful application of LLMs. In this space there is also Phind. It seems I use Perplexity as often as Google nowadays.

Deepseek's search is pretty much on par with perplexity already

Perplexity are also flagrant copyright violators

Because they summarize and cite sources or because their models were trained on copyrighted materials? Summarization and training should be tranformative, and the user questions add that element of novel purpose to the original materials that should make the output non derivative. But most of their responses are one time use, nobody is ever returning to them.

No, because they plagiarize

https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-plagiarized-our-story...

More than every other AI company?

Ha ha, Perplexity is the green bubble of chatbots.

Always interested in alternatives. What do you suggest?

Or due to their power, they've already secretly been taken over by the US Gov't. That's not really a "big conspiracy theory" at this point. I was mocked by the left for years for saying that the Gov't was involved in Facebook censorship. Turns out I was right. The biggest battle our Gov't has to wage is the battle for hearts and minds, and the control of information, and so they're trying to get in as deeply rooted as possible with every big AI company.

Are you referring to the firehose of covid misinformation spewed out of Facebook, or some other grift?

To be clear I wasn't blaming just the Gov't for all the censorship, because 99% of Facebook employees (including Zuck himself) were strongly in favor of censoring all conservative viewpoints, as well, and were in lock-step with Big Gov't controlling speech.

Zuck recently tried to blame it all on the FEDs (on JRE podcast) but he was obviously lying because Facebook even built a special portal for the FEDs to log into, for moderating/controlling the public, so he was the ring-leader of all the censorship, for about a decade.

my God what social media does to people to write and believe stuff like this… hopefully one day everything will be banned… amazing to read this - just amazing what seemingly normal human being can be made into believing!

Aw, Silicon Valley doesn't want everything banned. They just want all ideas that go against their world view banned. lol.

99% of Facebook employees (including Zuck himself) were strongly in favor of censoring all conservative viewpoints, as well, and were in lock-step with Big Gov't controlling speech.

how can you write this with the straight face when top like 100 accounts spreading shit on Facebook are right-wing nutcases. Give me on popular left-wing nutcase on Facebook?! believing that conservative views on any social media platform were ever being supressed is downright craaaaazy :)

Sorry dude. Nobody believes any of that in 2025. The claim that conservatives weren't being singled out on Social Media is laughable nowadays. All the companies have ADMITTED doing it. The Gov't has ADMITTED doing it.

I mean, conservatives were getting censored/attacked even for true things like saying COVID might have leaked from a lab, that there are only two sexes, that Hunter Laptop was real, that FBI lied on FISA warrant, that people meds are have horse-versions of them, Biden is senile, and on and on and on for countless other things.

kind of cool seeing where you are getting your “information” :) godspeed with all that!

Even CNN/MSM admits all of this nowadays, and you know it, but won't admit it.

And yet Twitter is censoring progressive viewpoints and even skewed the algo toward promoting a certain political candidate and yet not a single word from those free speech warriors.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298669/musk-trump-endo...

I'm generally in favor of Free Speech, but after Silicon Valley censored conservatives for a decade, during the entire Cancel Culture era, I think for them (liberals) to get to experience what it feels like to be censored themselves is probably a good thing. A good learning experience for them to begin to understand first hand how it feels, and what they did to others, without remorse, and with ill intent, for a decade.

So I say to all liberals complaining about Twitter censorship: "Turnabout is fair play" and "You deserve it, because you invented it."

"Yes, yes, that will show them... Fair play." In the background, the country burning.

Every Democrat in the DC Swamp is quaking in their boots right now out of fear that the Republicans might do to them what they did to the Republicans. They expect it to happen, because being so revenge-oriented themselves, they know it's what they'd do.

The difference is that, unlike liberals, Conservatives (especially MAGA) are God-fearing law-and-order abiding people, not motivated by hate, and not the evildoers that they were falsely accused of being, by the insane left and their Senile POTUS, for the past 8 years.

So don't worry, Democrats have nothing to fear but the exposing of their hypocrisy, and more loss of reputation as more truths come out.

That’s the bulk of the “justifiable” censorship but if you dig into the [largely overrated] “Twitter files,” sometimes they even got mad about jokes.

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