Comment by jaccola

My experience is that Perplexity is slightly better at providing facts than ChatGPT (in default mode), probably because (almost) everything comes from a source, not just the model's training set. Although Perplexity does mess up numbers as well.

My most recent experiment:

How many Google CEOs there have been?

Followed by the question

So 3 CEOs for 27 years. How does that number compare to other companies of this size

ChatGPT just completely hallucinates the answer -- 5 Microsoft CEOs over 50 years, 3 Amazon CEOs over 30 years, 2 Meta CEOs over 20 years which are just obviously wrong. You don't need to do a search to know these numbers -- they are definitely in the training dataset (barring the small possibility that there has been a CEO change in the past year in any of these companies, which apparently did not happen)

But Perplexity completely nailed it on first attempt without any additional instructions.

I use Perplexity all the time for search. It's very good at exactly that - internet search. So when using it for search related things it really shines

Yeah sure ChatGPT can spam a bunch of search queries through their search tool but it doesn't really come close to having Perplexity's search graph and index. Their sonar model is also specifically built for search

The thing is: Perplexity is quite good for some things; though, it has no traction outside of tech? Most non-techies havent heard about Gemini, what Ive seen/heard. (regardless the fact that they use the Google-Search-AI-overview every day)

I’ve moved all cursory searches to google.ai – perplexity’s future is dim.