From Reddit:
I love arc and its integration of AI features; however, I was surprised to see the perplexity integration. Can somebody give me a rundown on what is perplexity? I currently use google through arc, and I have my gmail accounts pinned and different google profiles with my passwords already saved and whatnot. For reference I don't do anything with coding or IT adjacent (which I saw a lot of tech bros hyping up perplexity online) - I am a premed student so making sure my search results are accurate and up to date are significantly important to me.
I guess long story short, is there a hassle when switching from google to perplexity, and if so is it worth it when arc already has so many cool features?
In its most basic form, it tries to understand your question, rephrase it to be better for a Google search, searches, picks a handful of results and summarises it for you with GPT-3.5 (I think turbo? not really sure).
If you use their Copilot feature, it gets much better. It will try to understand your question, split that into multiple focused Google searches, picks a lot of results (sometimes like 25) and condense them into a summary with GPT-4 (or any top model you wish to use). That summary can get lengthy (I've got 2-page ones) as your query gets more complicated. It will also sometimes ask follow-up questions to clearify up your query. You get 5 uses every 4 hours without paying, and something like 600 uses a day if you pay.
You also have the option to complete an "AI Profile", in which you introduce yourself to their model and answer a few questions about yourself. The model will use those info to try to tailor the results to your needs. This profile will be passed on as part of the system prompt in all searches, although Copilot seems to understand it better.
One thing is certain - it won't replace Google. You just can't avoid inaccuracies when dealing with generated text. You will need to go to the results manually to verify them, and sometimes you will need a straight up Google search. It is also a bit slower than Google, since it does need to query an actual search engine and do the summarisation.
The catch? It saves you some decent hassle. It really does. I've used it with multiple of my research works, and while it does take time to verify some of the info, it does saves a bunch of time and effort. There is a feature called "Focus" where you can instruct the engine to only search through focused areas, like academic papers. You can also focus it on writing to have it not search and just generate text.
Hope this gives you a bit of an idea. It is still best to try it on https://perplexity.ai and see for yourself. Keep in mind that you will need to sign up for an account to try Copilot, and you can only use it on their website (unless you manually add a site search that specifies Copilot in the url).
This was very insightful! It seems like a pretty cool concept, however it’s annoying that the copilot limited without paying. Might give it a spin!
f accuracy is important to you, then I would absolutely not be using AI to get information for you. I even asked Perplexity itself for the strengths and weaknesses of AI search, just to see what it would say, and it gave me a list of things like inaccuracy compared to normal search engines as weaknesses and all it could come up with as a strength was that people were working on AI search so that it'll be less inaccurate in the future.
I've tried Perplexity before and just don't like it. To me, it's like using Bing, but only getting Copilot responses instead of a search results page. Plus, they want to charge money for anything beyond their basic features. I don't understand why it's being hyped as a thing, but maybe it's just not to my taste.
I didn't even knew it existed until today. I just tried it and hated it. Won't be using it.
I love it. I have it set as my default arc search, with 'goog' as a trigger for a normal Google search
Honestly depends on your preferences. I tried it, and I found it super useful, and quickly switched to it as my default search engine.
The only time I still use Google is when I need to quickly see a lot of pictures of something as Perplexity provides only couple of the most relevant pictures to your search.
I believe that the Google is already sensing the heat under their arse. I got a couple of questions from them, one being: how much you trust our results. Gave them 2 out of five. In 0political matters they are extremely left and with general searches, paid advertisements can take pages.
Using Perplexity for my specific market research I got some results that Google NEVER even mentioned. To those who don't like it: statistically older professionals are BETTER at using AI, maybe because we are used to spending hours to get the relevant info and have definitely greater attention span that a few nanoseconds young generation has. Also we had to memorize much more technical data, before the web or even PC. I am taking a deep dive into this and expect to spend some serious time to master it.
Perplexity is your AI-powered Swiss Army Knife for information discovery and curiosity.It's now in mid-2024 the top AI tool in the world for white-collar professionals conducting research, trend analysis, and search related queries. But how to use it? How to integrate it into your workflows?