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.
I only stopped using Perplexity when the kill-sticky (login-workaround) stopped working correctly.
Early 2023 - August 2026, I used their rudimentary LLM before making any major purchase – seems like they really dropped the ball by both locking out users (log-in requirements) and not exploiting their early-Top10-LLM status to leverage into corporate ad influencing (again, which is how I primarily informed my own purchases, until login requirement).
I run most of my LLM locally at this point, but it would be great to have perplexity be the autistic shopping tool it once was. Ce la vi
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)
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.
>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.
If there's no moat then there's no need to be skeptical about a company with hundreds of millions in revenue. Their brand resonates well enough for that.
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.)
Oh yes, I don't disagree, but in my recollection, the pitch and the hype was always about how they never create fake sources and fake citations, at the time when that was a problem.
You would go to it, but results showed much more work was needed - also in RAG. Which became a general focus in the community, for the many problem it may solve and the many it could help fixing. Some found better formulas for RAG, others swamped. Perplexity made it a flag, but in a factual large company. And the problem with "fake sources and citations" is still there, while mitigated in the full complex systems - hallucination is still a benchmarked effect in LLM ANNs, and blunders from excessive trust are still recorded.
I still remember an HN post back when Perplexity was still the current hotness where the top comment about whatever AI news was analyzing MSFT stock with price history and key milestones, and cited Perplexity as their source. With some meta commentary about how easy research is now that tools like Perplexity are available.
Literally every cited number was flat out wrong. Some people replied to point out the mistakes but as I recall no one called out the Perplexity elephant in the room specifically.
I'll have to find it again, it was such an absurdly ironic scenario it felt like performance art or something.
They always were a "literally who". A lot of paid propaganda on blogs and even shills that were coming to sites like this, on Twitter, etc... were writing stuff for pennies per post (lmao) about how much they used it for this and that but it was all lies.
But people were not using them, regular non-tech folks have ZERO awareness of their brand.
There was a very brief period in the early days where Perplexity actually was pretty useful. I believe I even had a paid subscription to it for maybe half a year at that time. The main value it had then is that ChatGPT didn't yet incorporate web search, or early on after it did its searches were will really limited. There's no reason for Perplexity to exist now. I'm confident they and their investors are keeping it going mainly because no one wants to be the first major AI startup wipeout.
We used to have a lot of lectures of various kind, ranging from short 1-2 hour presentation of 'what's best and what to use' to three-day workshops on academic AI tools, etc. And Perplexity was always mentioned, alongside Scopus AI, Google Scholar AI, and various other weird stuff.
Besides some testing, I've never used it too for different reasons - I don't like my chat history and questions stored at some third party vendor that's just a startup.
Perplexity seems desperate. I used to be a subscriber, but they've been making their service worse to save money using tricks like "forgetting" that you picked a smarter model and switching you "accidentally" to their cheaper (and dumber) one.
Claude and ChatGPT basically offer the same functionality now, but with better models and more features.
When I started using Perplexity when they started out, it was such an awesome product. And they held that position for some time.
For some reason, I feel like it has gotten worse than it was. I don't know if it's just me.
Maybe chatgpt/claude just got increasingly better. Yet still feel they should have been able to keep up with it at least? but now they are just so much behind in terms of user experience and general product quality.
They substituted models quite often, and imposed low usage limits for users who had been onboarded for free. Supposedly it was for specific adverse situations such as heavy usage or overall load. [1]
I remember asking perplexity about the instructions for upgrading an open source app from several versions back to the latest release. I had hoped that it would search the relevant github, stack, overflow, and blogs. Instead, it hallucinated some instructions from its training corpus, which was incomplete and outdated. When I pushed back, “no, I want you to search for and read the latest instructions” it told me it couldn’t search for newer data and what it had already given me was as recent as it could provide.
If their tool can’t follow open source README files, why would I trust it with other research?
38 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 18.3 ms ] threadEarly 2023 - August 2026, I used their rudimentary LLM before making any major purchase – seems like they really dropped the ball by both locking out users (log-in requirements) and not exploiting their early-Top10-LLM status to leverage into corporate ad influencing (again, which is how I primarily informed my own purchases, until login requirement).
I run most of my LLM locally at this point, but it would be great to have perplexity be the autistic shopping tool it once was. Ce la vi
Honest question… why IP does Perplexity have that gives them any moat whatsoever left in this increasingly commoditized market?
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.
ChatGPT has the name, and Anthropic has ... the writing style is less cringe? (Well, it used to be, anyway...)
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
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.)
You would go to it, but results showed much more work was needed - also in RAG. Which became a general focus in the community, for the many problem it may solve and the many it could help fixing. Some found better formulas for RAG, others swamped. Perplexity made it a flag, but in a factual large company. And the problem with "fake sources and citations" is still there, while mitigated in the full complex systems - hallucination is still a benchmarked effect in LLM ANNs, and blunders from excessive trust are still recorded.
Literally every cited number was flat out wrong. Some people replied to point out the mistakes but as I recall no one called out the Perplexity elephant in the room specifically.
I'll have to find it again, it was such an absurdly ironic scenario it felt like performance art or something.
The differences between Opus 4.8, Opus 5.0 and Opus 5.5 are huge.
Lol, that's not true.
They always were a "literally who". A lot of paid propaganda on blogs and even shills that were coming to sites like this, on Twitter, etc... were writing stuff for pennies per post (lmao) about how much they used it for this and that but it was all lies.
But people were not using them, regular non-tech folks have ZERO awareness of their brand.
Besides some testing, I've never used it too for different reasons - I don't like my chat history and questions stored at some third party vendor that's just a startup.
Claude and ChatGPT basically offer the same functionality now, but with better models and more features.
They’re going to be sold for parts at some point at a valuation where common shareholders get zero.
I remember a lot of engineers joining with the promise of easy money and stock options “worth” millions. Now the company is basically irrelevant.
For some reason, I feel like it has gotten worse than it was. I don't know if it's just me.
Maybe chatgpt/claude just got increasingly better. Yet still feel they should have been able to keep up with it at least? but now they are just so much behind in terms of user experience and general product quality.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/perplexity_ai/comments/1orar1a/upda...
If their tool can’t follow open source README files, why would I trust it with other research?