If your goal is to replace one unreliable source of information (Google first page) with another, sure - we may be there. I'd argue the GPT 3.5 already outperformed Google for a significant number of queries. The only difference between then and now is that now the context window is large enough that we can afford to paste into the prompt what we hope are a few relevant files.
Yet what's essentially "cat [62 random files we googled] > prompt.txt" is now being confidently presented with academic language as "62 sources". This rubs me the wrong way. Maybe this time the new AI really is so much better than the old AI that it justifies using that sort of language, but I've seen this pattern enough times that I can be confident that's not the case.
> Yet what's essentially "cat [62 random files we googled] > prompt.txt" is now being confidently presented with academic language as "62 sources".
That's not a very charitable take.
I recently quizzed Perplexity (Pro) on a niche political issue in my niche country, and it compared favorably with a special purpose-built RAG on exactly that news coverage (it was faster and more fluent, info content was the same). As I am personally familiar with these topics I was able to manually verify that both were correct.
Outside these tests I haven't used Perplexity a lot yet, but so far it does look capable of surfacing relevant and correct info.
Perplexity with Deepseek R1 (they have the real thing running on Amazon servers in USA) is a game changer, it doesn’t just use top results from a Google search, it considers what domains to search for information relevant to your prompt.
I boycotted ai for about a year considering it to be mostly garbage but I’m back to perplexifying basically everything I need an answer fo
(That said, I agree with you they’re not really citations, but I don’t think they’re trying to be academic, it’s just, here’s the source of the info)
Yet what's essentially "cat [62 random files we googled] > prompt.txt" is now being confidently presented with academic language as "62 sources". This rubs me the wrong way. Maybe this time the new AI really is so much better than the old AI that it justifies using that sort of language, but I've seen this pattern enough times that I can be confident that's not the case.