Perplexity AI is Transforming Search into an Awesome Research Companion

It’s now valued at $520 million. Jeff Bezos is the latest investor in a series B round. It’s a clear challenge to Google Search. I’ve been quite impressed by it.

I’ve been in the communications profession for a long time as a radio DJ, journalist, start-up entrepreneur, media advisory firm leader, and communications product builder. There are three problems AI is currently solving for me. Not in the future. Now. Research efficiency. Content creation speed and quality for writing, photos, and videos. Cost-cutting, especially with crews, gear, travel, and hotel logistics. I’m working on an in-house work flow, and I’ll share with you what I find most useful.

If you find yourself with a little time… A good read: How Not to Be Stupid About AI, with Yann LeCun. He’s a pioneer of AI and Meta’s chief AI scientist. A good watch: How AI Can Empower Any Business with Andrew Ng. And check out Perplexity AI. This has been a new research tool that’s helping me out daily.

Perplexity AI

Per the platform: The term ‘Perplexity’ is an evaluation metric for language models that assess their performance predicting the next word in a sequence of words. The formula for calculating perplexity is:

Perplexity AI = 2H

Where H is the entropy of of the language model H = - 1/ N { log2 (p(w))

No idea how to explain any of this, at all, but I know I like using it !

Perplexity AI is now valued at over 500 million dollars. Jeff Bezos is the latest investor in a series B round. I’ve been quite impressed by it. It’s a clear challenge to Google Search. From Perplexity AI: The company's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, believes that by directly answering users' questions, there is no need for the traditional "10 blue links" provided by other search engines.

It’s definitely making my search experience better. About 10 million people are using this a month since it launched in December 2022. It feels like I’m having a conversation with someone who is giving me well informed responses. It’s powered by ChatGPT, and the tech is a ‘wrapper’ on Open AI.

It’s clean and easy to navigate. The response time is fast. The answers are more accurate than not. I like the sources being cited and the footnotes I can hit that will allow me to deep dive into the original story and verify the info. The daily news summaries or trends I ask it for are pretty good. I get the option of searching the whole internet, or specific places like YouTube, Wikipedia, or even academic papers. Video plays on the platform and it does not take me to another tab. There’s a follow up option to queries that I also really like.

The paid pro version allows you to interact with Claude (Anthropic) or Gemini (Google). There’s a feature called Co-Pilot you can turn on that clarifies any questions and gets you to be a little more specific so the answers are better. You can upload PDFs and summarize and translate them.

Downsides: some answers are a bit generic. I suggest you try it for yourself.