Perplexity launches AI agents for work

(perplexity.ai)

39 points | by cybermango 1 hour ago

7 comments

  • 5555watch 46 minutes ago
    It's crazy how they were THE AI to go to for researchers and anti-hallucination stuff. And how quickly they became irrelevant.

    But Sam Altman said back in the GPT-3.5 days that exactly this will happen to all GPT wrapper startups. [0]

    [0]: https://x.com/ai_for_success/status/1779930498623742187

    • mdp2021 15 minutes ago
      > to go to for ... anti-hallucination stuff

      In theory maybe, in some tentative hope that the RAG would patch the hallucination problem - but the LLM showed such a low effective equivalent IQ that its usage was always incredibly frustrating. (It could have improved recently - I am not sure. Some tests have indicated it as especially dumb even not long ago.)

    • DavCreator 21 minutes ago
    • jstummbillig 31 minutes ago
      Well, the circle around "wrapper company" is quickly expanding.
  • kingjimmy 1 hour ago
    Is perplexity still relevant?
    • these 0 minutes ago
      I personally enjoy the news feed part of it. It cleanly summarizes the major global news stories across several sources into 3 bullet points, and it doesn't show you any ads disguising as stories (eg product reviews, tips, etc)
    • ivanmontillam 1 hour ago
      Hardly, but I applaud the effort they do to remain in existence.

      They might get relegated to niche use cases, or pivot like Midjourney. I'm glad they exist, even for the sake of fighting against the duopoly that's just forming with OpenAI and Anthropic.

      Perplexity can fight Gemini for that 3rd spot. Gemini is kind of fumbling it, so they have a real fighting chance, imho.

      • abirch 1 hour ago
        Why is Gemini fumbling it? I use it for most of my personal projects and it's great for those.
        • warkaree 1 hour ago
          I use Gemini it's bundled with my phone contract. Its privacy is nightmare there is no opt out.
          • petcat 51 minutes ago
            From and investor and "market" perspective, the only AI that matters is the one built into your phone, TV, car, and all your smarthome appliances. Google and Apple completely own this space.

            If anything Anthropic and Open AI are at a severe disadvantage. Open AI at least provides backend model services for Siri. No idea what Anthropic does.

            • ivanmontillam 20 minutes ago
              > From and investor and "market" perspective, he only AI that matters is the one built into your phone, TV, car, and all your smarthome appliances.

              They can still be disqualified culturally speaking, as in, yeah every time you unbox a new smartphone it forces you to accept terms and conditions, yet you never open Gemini or Siri. That's great for the someone that will get that promotion and pay raise.

              An investor sees that app installs are increasing and that's "great for business," yet it's shallow because the real app usage isn't that high.

              "How come we have so many new installs but Claude is far more used?" They have all that telemetry, they should know that for certain.

              Google and Apple can force installation and even terms and conditions agreement, but they cannot fake user commitment.

              > Google and Apple completely own this space.

              Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer, and once it became technically inferior (IE7+) to others, Chrome and Firefox ate the market share of it. Then it was Chrome all the way in.

              Internet Explorer became "the browser you loved to hate," and they even did a campaign on that motto.

              The technical debt was so heavy, they had to start over with Edge, and it still doesn't gain market share as it is expected. Just because it comes deeply ingrained in the mobile OS that still doesn't grant them ability to win the hearts of the users.

              I'm one of those that delete the Gemini app every now and then (it becomes auto-installed with each OS update, it's hostile behavior).

              Gemini and Siri still have to be good even if it's forced on our devices. We already know Siri lost it[0]. Siri is comically bad.

              --

              [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104465

          • 0c3ca83 52 minutes ago
            Yeah, but all of the LLMs are a privacy nightmare, as is any Google product.
          • jstummbillig 30 minutes ago
            Everything about that sounds like Google got it figured out for themselves.
        • alterom 1 hour ago
          I get better quality output from Perplexity than Gemini.

          That said, I stick to Claude in the terminal for 99% of my LLM usage.

          • abirch 1 hour ago
            Is this a gemini vs Antigravity-cli thing? I use agy as my cli at home and it's as good as Opus/Sonnet for me -- but I haven't tried very taxing tasks. I use Aragon/Flash. I'm not modifying large code bases, more like vibe coding throwaway projects at home.
          • 0c3ca83 1 minute ago
            I too get better flavor from dog turds than rat turds.
      • borg16 50 minutes ago
        I do not understand how you can conclude that they both are even competitors - along any dimension

        Perplexity has now become a speciality tool used for a few use cases primarily via third party models (unsure if they are still continuing to develop their own mdoels and where they rank)

        Google on the other hand is still actively trying to develop SOTA models (or at least 3rd best) and also is widely used amongst cost sensitive projects.

        I see no comparison between them worth putting them alongside each other.

      • okdood64 57 minutes ago
        The CEO just needs to do more CNBC appearances and they're good.
    • Mattasher 20 minutes ago
      Absolutely! I use it all day as a fact finder and search engine. It's a much cleaner interface than Google, no ads or spam results, and it does basic analysis quite well. Recently I've been asking it to "Tell me the downsides of living at the following location..." and it does a solid job of synthesizing common complaints and it has memory, so it can target that to what I've said before.
    • tinyhouse 48 minutes ago
      They have users and revenue in the hundreds of millions so yes. No affiliation. I don't use their service either.

      I also think that this is going to be very useful and many startups are entering this space of agent teammates with persistent memory.

    • cute_boi 9 minutes ago
      Nope. There is no reason to use perplexity.
  • sehw 19 minutes ago
    Who?
  • andai 21 minutes ago
    Didn't they make a computer thing like a year ago? I think it was called computer. (Right around the time OpenClaw was big?)

    Edit: https://www.perplexity.ai/products/computer

  • cmiles8 48 minutes ago
    I forgot Perplexity even still existed. They went from all the rage to nobody talks about them anymore.

    Honest question… what IP does Perplexity have that gives them any moat whatsoever left in this increasingly commoditized market?

    • wmchen 23 minutes ago
      >I forgot Perplexity even still existed. They went from all the rage to nobody talks about them anymore.

      A lot of the early hype was driven by how liberally they were handing out free Pro memberships. For a while, every telco, bank, etc. was handing it out as a free promotional offer. I don't think anyone I know that raved about it ever gave them a single dime.

      Their product was definitely cool for a few months, but they had zero moat to begin with (considering how quickly the frontier labs caught up), and the conversion rate on those free sign-ups must have been abysmal, especially after they nerfed the free Pro subscriptions on both quality and quantity dimensions, and their own "politically neutral" DeepSeek R1 distillation didn't pan out.

      • andai 13 minutes ago
        [dead]
    • deepwoods 29 minutes ago
      Name ID. They were around early and got their name out there. If you don't keep up with the blow-by-blow of the tech and the surrounding market, you may not know that there are better alternatives available.
    • andai 16 minutes ago
      What moat does anyone have? Google wrote the "we have no moat" memo and they're literally Google (better hardware, better data, billions of users...)

      ChatGPT has the name, and Anthropic has ... the writing style is less cringe? (Well, it used to be, anyway...)

    • 48585858 42 minutes ago
      [flagged]
  • RetardedBastard 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • zk108 51 minutes ago
    what is it that these lot do again?