[fdr]

I do like Perplexity.ai. But interpreting how it works, and portrays itself as, is that the LLM component of it is, in fact, not a search engine.

How I interpret it: it is a more powerful version of stemming and synonym expansion of information retrieval classics when generating the queries it feeds into traditional information systems (such as the Bing search engine via API, or other index).

After retrieval, it's a selector and summarizer of repetition seen in the results to give you something of a blended outcome, pertinent to the prompt you gave it. Like any other tool, you get a feel for when it has is having problems, and some of those problems can be assessed by at least glancing at the sources it consulted. You get all sorts of weird stuff when your sources don't include relevant results or biased results

The first problem happens when the documents you are searching for do not exist, or something about your prompt -- it's usually obvious what it is -- is not sourcing documents you know to exist.

The second, bias, I've seen when researching something like the design conceits of Infiniband. While it has its genuine virtues, almost nobody talks about it...and many of those things that discuss it are Infiniband marketing materials that are both a bit too fluffy and sometimes stretch the truth, as marketing materials are wont to do. But you can spot this in the sources panel immediately.

I never found "disembodied" LLMs very useful.