Perplexity launches AI agents for work

Posted by cybermango 2 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by 5555watch 1 hour ago

It's crazy how they were THE AI to go to for researchers and anti-hallucination stuff. And how quickly they became irrelevant.

But Sam Altman said back in the GPT-3.5 days that exactly this will happen to all GPT wrapper startups. [0]

[0]: https://x.com/ai_for_success/status/1779930498623742187

Comment by mdp2021 47 minutes ago

> to go to for ... anti-hallucination stuff

In theory maybe, in some tentative hope that the RAG would patch the hallucination problem - but the LLM showed such a low effective equivalent IQ that its usage was always incredibly frustrating. (It could have improved recently - I am not sure. Some tests have indicated it as especially dumb even not long ago.)

Comment by 5555watch 22 minutes ago

Oh yes, I don't disagree, but in my recollection, the pitch and the hype was always about how they never create fake sources and fake citations, at the time when that was a problem.

Comment by k__ 30 minutes ago

Yeah, it seemed like snake oil to me. It never worked reliably.

Comment by jstummbillig 1 hour ago

Well, the circle around "wrapper company" is quickly expanding.

Comment by kingjimmy 1 hour ago

Is perplexity still relevant?

Comment by ivanmontillam 1 hour ago

Hardly, but I applaud the effort they do to remain in existence.

They might get relegated to niche use cases, or pivot like Midjourney. I'm glad they exist, even for the sake of fighting against the duopoly that's just forming with OpenAI and Anthropic.

Perplexity can fight Gemini for that 3rd spot. Gemini is kind of fumbling it, so they have a real fighting chance, imho.

Comment by abirch 1 hour ago

Why is Gemini fumbling it? I use it for most of my personal projects and it's great for those.

Comment by warkaree 1 hour ago

I use Gemini it's bundled with my phone contract. Its privacy is nightmare there is no opt out.

Comment by petcat 1 hour ago

From and investor and "market" perspective, the only AI that matters is the one built into your phone, TV, car, and all your smarthome appliances. Google and Apple completely own this space.

If anything Anthropic and Open AI are at a severe disadvantage. Open AI at least provides backend model services for Siri. No idea what Anthropic does.

Comment by spogbiper 31 minutes ago

> Open AI at least provides backend model services for Siri.

Do they? I thought that was Google/Gemini now.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/apple-google-ai-siri-gemini....

Comment by browningstreet 28 minutes ago

Funny Friday

Comment by ivanmontillam 52 minutes ago

> From and investor and "market" perspective, he only AI that matters is the one built into your phone, TV, car, and all your smarthome appliances.

They can still be disqualified culturally speaking, as in, yeah every time you unbox a new smartphone it forces you to accept terms and conditions, yet you never open Gemini or Siri. That's great for the someone that will get that promotion and pay raise.

An investor sees that app installs are increasing and that's "great for business," yet it's shallow because the real app usage isn't that high.

"How come we have so many new installs but Claude is far more used?" They have all that telemetry, they should know that for certain.

Google and Apple can force installation and even terms and conditions agreement, but they cannot fake user commitment.

> Google and Apple completely own this space.

Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer, and once it became technically inferior (IE7+) to others, Chrome and Firefox ate the market share of it. Then it was Chrome all the way in.

Internet Explorer became "the browser you loved to hate," and they even did a campaign on that motto.

The technical debt was so heavy, they had to start over with Edge, and it still doesn't gain market share as it is expected. Just because it comes deeply ingrained in the mobile OS that still doesn't grant them ability to win the hearts of the users.

I'm one of those that delete the Gemini app every now and then (it becomes auto-installed with each OS update, it's hostile behavior).

Gemini and Siri still have to be good even if it's forced on our devices. We already know Siri lost it[0]. Siri is comically bad.

--

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104465

Comment by 0c3ca83 1 hour ago

Yeah, but all of the LLMs are a privacy nightmare, as is any Google product.

Comment by jstummbillig 1 hour ago

Everything about that sounds like Google got it figured out for themselves.

Comment by alterom 1 hour ago

I get better quality output from Perplexity than Gemini.

That said, I stick to Claude in the terminal for 99% of my LLM usage.

Comment by abirch 1 hour ago

Is this a gemini vs Antigravity-cli thing? I use agy as my cli at home and it's as good as Opus/Sonnet for me -- but I haven't tried very taxing tasks. I use Aragon/Flash. I'm not modifying large code bases, more like vibe coding throwaway projects at home.

Comment by 0c3ca83 32 minutes ago

I too get better flavor from dog turds than rat turds.

Comment by borg16 1 hour ago

I do not understand how you can conclude that they both are even competitors - along any dimension

Perplexity has now become a speciality tool used for a few use cases primarily via third party models (unsure if they are still continuing to develop their own mdoels and where they rank)

Google on the other hand is still actively trying to develop SOTA models (or at least 3rd best) and also is widely used amongst cost sensitive projects.

I see no comparison between them worth putting them alongside each other.

Comment by okdood64 1 hour ago

The CEO just needs to do more CNBC appearances and they're good.

Comment by these 31 minutes ago

I personally enjoy the news feed part of it. It cleanly summarizes the major global news stories across several sources into 3 bullet points, and it doesn't show you any ads disguising as stories (eg product reviews, tips, etc)

Comment by Mattasher 52 minutes ago

Absolutely! I use it all day as a fact finder and search engine. It's a much cleaner interface than Google, no ads or spam results, and it does basic analysis quite well. Recently I've been asking it to "Tell me the downsides of living at the following location..." and it does a solid job of synthesizing common complaints and it has memory, so it can target that to what I've said before.

Comment by tinyhouse 1 hour ago

They have users and revenue in the hundreds of millions so yes. No affiliation. I don't use their service either.

I also think that this is going to be very useful and many startups are entering this space of agent teammates with persistent memory.

Comment by cute_boi 41 minutes ago

Nope. There is no reason to use perplexity.

Comment by tyre 24 minutes ago

Does anyone know if they have done secondary sales / tender offers for employees?

They’re going to be sold for parts at some point at a valuation where common shareholders get zero.

I remember a lot of engineers joining with the promise of easy money and stock options “worth” millions. Now the company is basically irrelevant.

Comment by jwr 27 minutes ago

Perplexity seems desperate. I used to be a subscriber, but they've been making their service worse to save money using tricks like "forgetting" that you picked a smarter model and switching you "accidentally" to their cheaper (and dumber) one.

Claude and ChatGPT basically offer the same functionality now, but with better models and more features.

Comment by sehw 50 minutes ago

Who?

Comment by andai 52 minutes ago

Didn't they make a computer thing like a year ago? I think it was called computer. (Right around the time OpenClaw was big?)

Edit: https://www.perplexity.ai/products/computer

Comment by cmiles8 1 hour ago

I forgot Perplexity even still existed. They went from all the rage to nobody talks about them anymore.

Honest question… what IP does Perplexity have that gives them any moat whatsoever left in this increasingly commoditized market?

Comment by wmchen 54 minutes ago

>I forgot Perplexity even still existed. They went from all the rage to nobody talks about them anymore.

A lot of the early hype was driven by how liberally they were handing out free Pro memberships. For a while, every telco, bank, etc. was handing it out as a free promotional offer. I don't think anyone I know that raved about it ever gave them a single dime.

Their product was definitely cool for a few months, but they had zero moat to begin with (considering how quickly the frontier labs caught up), and the conversion rate on those free sign-ups must have been abysmal, especially after they nerfed the free Pro subscriptions on both quality and quantity dimensions, and their own "politically neutral" DeepSeek R1 distillation didn't pan out.

Comment by andai 44 minutes ago

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Comment by deepwoods 1 hour ago

Name ID. They were around early and got their name out there. If you don't keep up with the blow-by-blow of the tech and the surrounding market, you may not know that there are better alternatives available.

Comment by browningstreet 26 minutes ago

If there's no moat then there's no need to be skeptical about a company with hundreds of millions in revenue. Their brand resonates well enough for that.

Comment by andai 47 minutes ago

What moat does anyone have? Google wrote the "we have no moat" memo and they're literally Google (better hardware, better data, billions of users...)

ChatGPT has the name, and Anthropic has ... the writing style is less cringe? (Well, it used to be, anyway...)

Comment by 48585858 1 hour ago

[flagged]

Comment by LewisVerstappen 1 hour ago

@dang - can we ban racist fuckwads from HN?

Comment by dainiusse 18 minutes ago

rip perplexity

Comment by zk108 1 hour ago

what is it that these lot do again?

Comment by RetardedBastard 1 hour ago

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