Whatever happened to Preplexity? They were all the rage a year or two ago, and now I hear...nothing. Is the product still being used? Making money? Or just overtaken by the base LLMs it was relying on?
It's been pointed out on Reddit that this move was not even legal in most EU because they have not been able to point out which of their ToC has been infringed (their official motive for cancellation). I am tired of companies behaving like cowboys...
One thing I noticed is that whatever harness PPLX wraps around the models, the output is noticeably lower quality in aggregate. I assume some kind of token compression being used before passing your query to a given model but to my knowledge that's never been proven or confirmed?
Anyways, I get the most value out of coding and PPLX has seemingly pivoted away from that. Probably a good play to not try and compete directly with Claude Code/Codex and find a better niche, but I am not sure who or what their market is. Lovely design, however.
- Perplexity: This one has been promoted on (insert general audience media skewing toward the older set) enough to be a household name still.
- ChatGPT: General people in some demographics (see immediately above) are averse to this, on account of negative publicity its parent company has received. (Still very strong popularity and positive sentiment in some demographics, though)
- Claude: Some semi-literates have glommed onto this one, possibly as a result of its more recent success among the developer set.
- Grok: People can be either for or against, based on how they feel about its owning company and its ownership; no more need be said
- Gemini: Again, if you are in the universe of its owning company (or decidedly not), the draw (or repulsion) can be strong here.
For general LLM use, the above are all about the same. To be clear, this is just me shooting from the hip for how each offering might be viewed. IMO, it's not a bad idea to submit the same input to each and see how they compare, if one is so inclined.
- Copilot: Great at finding and discussing docs, conversations, and other work items that it is connected to. For everything else, it seems somehow less smart than the others (YMMV).
Emphasis on the YMMV, obviously. Maybe my impression is colored by a small number of unlucky, less than stellar experiences (comparatively speaking).