Perplexity AI is becoming a hot topic recently having secured some well-known investors and a recent partnership with Rabbit. So what’s all the hype about?

Similar to ChatGPT, Perplexity AI is a large language model aimed at answering natural language questions, primarily used for research and learning. However, Perplexity stands out from other AI tools by providing links to sources and suggestions in response to your queries; enabling you to fact check the response as well as do your own further research.

Here’s an example where I asked what I should include about Perplexity AI when writing this thread:

As you can see, it suggests some questions for inspiration on the homepage and also allows you to free-type any question you wish. If you’ve got co-pilot enabled, it may ask you follow up questions to refine its answer before providing it. Users on the free plan are allowed 5 co-pilot queries every 4 hours. Without co-pilot enabled, Perplexity will answer your initial question without asking any questions back to you.

It then provided sources and wrote a clear answer to my question, citing its references at the end of each sentence or section. Lastly, there’s a related questions section and the opportunity to ask a follow up question within the same thread.

As with other chat AI tools, you can organise your questions into separate threads. I’ve also briefly used Perplexity to ask the best transport method from one destination to another with heavy luggage. It provided some information and sources that I hadn’t yet found myself with Google! I’m definitely going to keep experimenting with it to help me plan my next holiday.

There’s also a nice widget available:

From here you can directly ask a question, enable co-pilot, use Google Assistant to type or visit the discovery tab. If you have Perplexity Pro, you can also use the image upload option. However, this costs $20 p/month. Sadly, without Pro the image button is useless and just prompts you to purchase Pro. With Pro, you have access to “over 300 daily queries” with co-pilot as well as the option to choose your preferred AI model from GPT-4, Claude 2.1, Gemini, or Perplexity.

Perplexity AI is available both on web and as an app.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Do you use AI tools? What’s your favourite AI tool? Could Perplexity take over the number 1 AI tool spot?

    This is super interesting! I’ve downloaded the app and have been trying out the widget purely for travel planning. My first search was “What are the top attractions in Barcelona, and how far in advance should I book?” I then screenshot the results to remind the trip group chat that we needed to book, and it saved so much time. I’ll be trying it out more over the weekend, but so far I appreciate how easy it is to use, and find and verify info!

    Interesting thread. Have seen the word ‘Perplexity’ quite a lot over the past few days, but I haven’t bothered opening any link I saw, because I just thought ‘yet another LLM who wants to join in on this hype’. Not sure if it was even worth to look into it more. But thanks to you it’s already a little bit easier 😉

    The thing I’m struggling with mostly in this topic is: before I can get used to 1, a lot more are already available, but it’s hard to decide if they’re better and worth transitioning to them. I guess it’s just a matter of trying it out.

    I definitely need some more convincing before Perplexity becomes my go-to tool, so I’m curious if you have now examples/experiences to share!

      Mr Steel before I can get used to 1, a lot more are already available, but it’s hard to decide if they’re better and worth transitioning to them. I guess it’s just a matter of trying it out.

      I actually see this as a benefit - there’s a lot of competition in this space and that pushes people to innovate more to entice people to use their AI and become the best of the best. I don’t feel tied to any particular service right now, mostly I guess because I’m not paying for anything and it’s as easy as entering my email address to join a new site; so hopping between different AI tools isn’t difficult and I can easily decide which one will be best suited for the task/question I need to perform.

      I said above that I’ve used it to ask about a method of transportation and the benefit of using Perplexity here over other LLM tools is that I can verify its answers and double check it’s not just making things up based on the sources it provided which is essential for something like travel planning.

      I’ve only just started using it myself but with a big trip coming up this year, I’ll keep trying it and reporting back with my findings!

      Mr Steel Largely had the same feelings as you! Thanks Adam for the digestible insight. Cool to see ideas like this emerge and squash the gripes that people have with existing generative apps.

      One aspect that contributes to the magic of AI services is hiding the blend of sources that contributes to a result, but I can see how, for certain requests, that isn’t very helpful!

      Interesting, but again really expensive as every other model out there… GPT3.5 as a free alternative is more than enough for most of the people. And GPT 4 is showing some weakness in more and more domain.

      I’m really interested in Mixtral AI models, those French guys are redefining how AI model are built. And you can build your own AI model locally for free with a bit of developer knowledge and a good PC. And it’s in par with GPT4…

      Nice topic and informed me about what Perplexity is, having heard a lot about it recently and questioning the use cases. I like the widget, seems simple enough but a shame the image part if a paid feature - I guess they need to make up their money somehow!

      It seems I share the opinion of others around there now being too many choices, and it becoming harder to decide which is best or how to transition between them. This is quite healthy for the industry, as AI used in this way is still fairly new (and exciting). Will keep my eyes peeled and see how this evolves over the next few years. Interesting to see how good AI will be by then 👀

        Louis ☕️ i’m just guessing, but I think the AI text is handled via GPT-3.5 API, thus free/cheap. But the image part uses the GPT4 API, which is much more expensive. That’s why they charge for it, I think.

        I’ve been using Perplexity a little more since writing this thread and have found it’s much more accurate and up to date than ChatGPT for example, as it can access and provide direct sources. I asked a discord.py specific question, ChatGPT couldn’t get the right answer even when I asked to correct itself due to it only having knowledge of an older version of the library and prompted me to use a different library. Perplexity was able to tell me the right information for discord.py specifically and gave me the sources to allow me to follow up with my own research on how to implement it within my bot!

        The only downside I’ve noticed so far is that you can’t say thank you! 😂 It treats it as a question and tries to search for an answer

          adbo The Data might be more correct thats true! But since it uses newsarticles and such the data could still be old/ outdated like in this example:

          Source

          Certainly picking up speed! Perplexity is now a default search engine option in Arc browser.

          Up until recently i’ve not really delved much into these AI platforms aside from some basic image generation and asking how to correctly title case a sentence 😂

          With Perplexity i find myself experimenting a lot more and i really like that it provides sources and prompts you with further questions.

          a month later

          In light of the Phone(2a) and Perplexity announcement, this has been a really useful thread to visit! I certainly think I’m going to look into Perplexity more and see how I could use it!

          a year later

          adbo Perplexity now support assistant and it look better design than gemini or google assistant.

          @adbo Aha I see. I guess nothing is eyeing for another partnership and maybe perplexity can be the one to be behind the AI juice new nothing phones will be getting. I have followed perplexity since their Inception and wouldn’t be surprised if like minded individuals joined for on this one. @Carl definitely can make it happen. I love how their UI just seems to be tailor made for nothing phones ( design language specifics ) .

          Pls help with this

          Merged 1 post from Please help me with this....