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points by alberth 13 hours ago | 0 comments
I know Perplexity isn't often talked about anymore but their design of every sentence needing to be able to be referenced back to an actual source (like an academic peer reviewed paper) seems like a super power for trust.
[–] _0ffh 12 hours ago
Yeah, until you follow the link only to find out that the link does not say what Perplexity told you it does. This happened to me a frightful number of times.
[–] xnorswap 12 hours ago
They're referenced here and don't appear to score much better, assuming this page isn't itself a parody and just zombie stats themselves.
[–] tmpz22 13 hours ago
My initial experience with Perplexity was it citing AI blog spam as a primary source so consistently I immediately dropped my subscription. (this was over a year ago, I haven't re-evaluated them since)
[–] jedbrooke 12 hours ago
I’ve added to my system prompt in perplexity “ignore unreliable sources” and “make sure claims are supported by multiple sources” and that seems to help.

Of course for anything of consequence I’d go and actually read the sources (but for plenty of every day stuff it’s fine). On the free plan btw

[–] 10111001 9 hours ago
> I’ve added to my system prompt in perplexity “ignore unreliable sources” and “make sure claims are supported by multiple sources” and that seems to help.

Don't forget to add "don't make mistakes!"

[–] OtomotO 12 hours ago
> I’ve added to my system prompt in perplexity “ignore unreliable sources”

Ah, the good old magic trick!

[–] jedbrooke 11 hours ago
It works surprisingly well sometimes (:

LLMs are really weird sometimes. I had some issues using a coding harness where the agent was failing to use the correct tool call syntax (I was using some rando free model on OpenRouter). I sent a message “look closelier at the tool call format” then all the tool calls for the rest of the session succeeded.

[–] dubcanada 13 hours ago
Is it up to Perplexity to determine what is AI blog spam & what is correct. Versus what exists online?
[–] gjm11 12 hours ago
I'm not sure what the question means.

Whether Perplexity is useful to someone, and how useful, will depend on how effective it is in giving answers that are (1) correct as often as possible and (2) checkable if they're sometimes wrong.

If Perplexity's answers often treat AI-generated blogspam as reliable then that will probably make them less often correct (because people generating AI blogspam generally don't need what they generate to be consistently correct) and harder to check (because people generating AI blogspam generally don't need what they have to be clearly sourced, and because even if they did it's an extra step of link-following).

So if Perplexity turns up a lot of AI-generated blogspam, that probably makes it less useful. Is it "up to Perplexity"? Again, I don't know what that means, but I don't see that it matters. What matters is how much value it provides, at what cost in time and money and effort and attention. If its output is mostly repeating claims from AI-generated blogspam and that makes the answer "not much, and at too much", then so much the worse for Perplexity even if there's some sense in which it's under no obligation to do better. If its output is reliable and checkable, then so much the better for Perplexity even if some of its deficiencies are in some sense moral failures.

[–] degamad 13 hours ago
How do they ensure that?
[–] marcosdumay 13 hours ago
They fine tune for that, they don't ensure anything.

(Or at least they used to, I think they changed everything recently, but I've mostly stopped using them.)

[–] rozal 13 hours ago
No one ensures what it does but it’s proactive, it gets the people buying
[–] Creamsicle47 13 hours ago
Agents in Paris?
[–] alienbaby 12 hours ago
Blades of glory for the original quote.
[–] bongofizzbuzz 11 hours ago
I want it "that" way.