About Perplexity

Some months ago, I became aware of Perplexity, an AI powered search engine at https://www.perplexity.ai/ . Initially it didn't seem to be interesting after trying Microsoft's AI Copilot chatbot and getting disappointing results. However, Google's regular search algorithm was giving back less useful, more irrelevant results over time. 

Google's deterioration in search result quality prompted regular but occasional Perplexity searches, the results of which were hit or miss, but usually reasonably good hits. With time, my ability to ask questions and follow-up questions got more sophisticated and on-point. With less room for misinterpretation of my questions, Perplexity's results generally got better. By now, more than half of my searches are with Perplexity, not standard Google. That was quite unexpected. I had been primarily using Google search since the early 2000s and did not expect that anything could displace it.

Using AI raises some questions. One is energy use by AI compared to standard searches. A traditional Google search query uses approximately 0.0003 kWh (1.08 kJ) of energy. By contrast, an AI-powered search query uses about 10 times more energy. 1 kJ is the energy dissipated as heat with an electric current of one ampere passing through a resistance of one ohm for one second. Anyway, the amount of energy use for AI searching is huge. If most online searching converts to AI, gigantic amounts of new electricity generation will be needed.

Another is who owns Perplexity. Perplexity AI is a privately-owned startup company founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. Aravind Srinivas currently serves as the CEO of Perplexity. The company raised a total of $165 million in funding as of 2024. The company reached a valuation of over $1 billion in 2024, making it a "unicorn" startup. Notable investors include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy, Nat Friedman, and Garry Tan, among others. I don't know anything about those owners but they could wind up being a new batch of billionaires. That makes them potentially important politically and socially.

FWIW, some of the wonks over at r/lexfridman are impressed with the depth of knowledge that Srinivas has. 

Another issue with AI is when it gets answers wrong, it can be really wrong. It is best to know something about what you ask for so that a bad answer can be more easily spotted. If you know nothing about what you ask about, checking some of the links to information sources is needed. But even then, AI can sneak bad answers past a person. One problem with AI is that it usually isn't as good as a person at summarizing information. An article about research in Australia on AI search results commented that "AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information."

I found the same with some of my searches. However, searches with little or no nuance, e.g., recitation of science facts or calculations, have been reliable for me so far. 

One weakness is searches that ask about commercial products. AI tends to rely on what companies says about their own products. That can easily lead to false answers. One example was a query about the publisher of clinical evidence about the sleep aid Relaxium Sleep, an over the counter product that recently started advertising on TV. I asked Perplexity if the publisher, Annex Publishers, was a reputable science source. Perplexity said it was a good publisher. Based on the Relaxium clinical sleep data, I knew the publisher was fly-by-night crap and the Relaxium people were quacks. 

So I posed a follow-up question asking why Perplexity said Annex Publishers was reputable when in fact it published low quality to fraudulent science data. That apparently prompted Perplexity to change its search parameters to look for indicia of high quality science publishing, not to take the propaganda Annex put out about itself. The new answer was that Annex indeed was a source of low quality science information, which its publishing guidelines made clear.

From what I can tell, it looks like AI search really could come to dominate online search. At this point, I presume I am a beta tester for Perplexity and sooner or later, the searches will need to be monetized either by larding answers up with ads or by charging people to use the energy-guzzling search engine. 

I'm not sure what I will do when that day comes. I'll figure it out then. But at least now I can clearly see how AI could and probably will become a huge deal.