In fiddling about on Mastodon, I came across a post linking to an article on Forbes: “‘Like Wikipedia And ChatGPT Had A Kid’: Inside The Buzzy AI Startup Coming For Google’s Lunch“.

Well, that deserved a look if only because search engine results across the board give spammy first pages, Google inclusive, and Wikipedia is a resource that I like because of one main thing: citations.

ChatGPT is… well, it’s interesting, but it’s… limited because you have to double check everything from your prompt to the results. So the idea of mixing the two is definitely attractive.

Thus, I ended up at Perplexity.ai and did some searches, some tricky ones that I know that other search engines often get wrong related to me. Perplexity stumbled in the results but cited the sources that pushed it the wrong way, as well as cited the sources that pushed it the right way.

That’s perfect for me right now. It gives the citations above the response, so you know where stuff is coming from. You can then omit citations that are wrong while drilling down into what it is you’re supposed to be looking into. For me, with the amount of research I do, this saves me a whole lot of tabs in my web browser and therefore allows me a mental health bonus in keeping track of what I’m writing about.

Of course, when I find something useful like this, I put it under bright lights and interrogate it because on impulse I almost subscribed immediately. I’ve held off, at least for now, but so far it has me pondering my ChatGPT4 subscription since it’s much more of what I need and much less of what I don’t. When I am researching things to write, I need to be able to drill down and not be subject to hallucinations. I need the sources. ChatGPT can do that, and ChatGPT gives me access to DALL-E, but how many images do I need? How often do I use ChatGPT? Not that much, really.

I’m also displeased with present behemoth search engines, particularly since they collect information. Does Perplexity.ai collect information on users? According to the Perplexity.AI privacy policy, they do not. That’s at least hopeful. In the shifting landscape of user data, it’s hard to say what the future holds with any company. A buyout, change in management or a shift in the wind of a public toilet could cause policies to change, so we constantly have to keep an eye on that, but in the immediate, it is promising.

My other main query was about the Fediverse, which is notoriously not indexed. This is largely because of the nature of the Fediverse. It didn’t have much on that, as I expected.

I’ll be using it anonymously for a while to see how it works for me. If you’re looking for options for researching topics, Perplexity.ai may be worth a look.

Otherwise I would not have written about it.