I got some Perplexity merchandise for Christmas, which got me thinking about why I keep going back to this tool. Despite OpenAI trying to add search into ChatGPT, Perplexity still wins for research tasks. Let me explain why.
Perplexity excels at giving you answers when you don’t already know exactly where to find them. For direct website navigation, Google still makes sense. But if I need specific information or answers to questions, Perplexity delivers better results.
They’re building out their ecosystem too. An extension called Complexity adds extra features like theme customization and custom instructions. Often these features show up in Complexity before Perplexity releases them officially.
It’s important to note that Perplexity isn’t trying to compete directly with ChatGPT. They don’t create their own foundation models like OpenAI or Anthropic do. While they have some fine-tuned versions of Llama models, their strength comes from building an excellent framework around existing models that makes research incredibly effective.
Their API has become essential to my content systems. I use it constantly to pull in factual research rather than relying on ChatGPT’s tendency to make things up. Each tool serves different purposes in my workflow:
– Perplexity: Finding specific information and facts
– Gemini with deep research: Tasks requiring analysis of hundreds of sources
– ChatGPT: Convenience, custom GPTs, and voice chat
– Claude: When I need the most capable model
I wrote more about comparing different AI models in my post about Claude vs GPT performance here: https://adam.holter.com/strong-ai-is-already-here-look-at-the-evidence/
Perplexity keeps improving too. You can see some interesting analysis of how people are using it in my recent post about their search trends: https://adam.holter.com/2024-perplexity-search-trends-tech-elections-and-armadillo-repellent/
The key is picking the right tool for each task. Perplexity dominates for research because that’s exactly what it was built to do. While other AI tools try to be everything for everyone, Perplexity focused on doing one thing extremely well.
