I very rarely diss other people’s work, but Arc/Dia is a perfect example of that. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothes, without any clarity regarding their business model.
Videos from Perplexity as well as YouTubers show what it's supposed to do: provide you an interface to simplify your research, evaluation, and execution of written instruction.
For example: you're supposed to tell it to do something like, "plan my week for me including make me a menu plan, setup a grocery list and add everything I need to it, shop the list and allow me to pick it up on Sunday afternoon, and, in the meantime, plan for me 2 days of things to do." And supposedly, it will do all of these things for you automatically. I haven't tested it, but it basically this is intended to do all the things we've hoped AI would help us do--automatically. Will it be successful? Probably a bit better than we've come to expect, but it's nothing like we have built up in our minds.
AI has been game changing for me in my work life, but I have yet to find it useful for things like I laid out above. Maybe that's changing and this is the first step toward that future.
Apple should acquire Perplexity - it's a pretty great product and combined with some privacy enhancements it's a win, and they could likely integrate it better than Google could with Gemini.
I was gifted a pro subscription for a year and after trying it for a few weeks I instead signed up for an Anthropic Claude subscription (which I pay $20 / month for) and I use that all the time.
I signed up and I no longer use most other websites. I only use Kagi for basic searches, where I want to get to a destination and not get information.
Perplexity “does the googling for me” and summarizes or seeks for me. No more skimming and synthesizing. No more crafting search queries and comparing. Ask a question, no matter how obscure or specific, and it fetches the real time answer.
Honestly not much has ever so drastically changed how I use the internet.
As a cultural synthesizer ("create a sketch...") or translator (i.e., from human to programming) perplexity is as good as the others and maybe worse. But I like it as being an alternative semantic web search engine. Search engine because most of the time the facts are referenced at the end of the paragraphs and when it fails to insert them, I usually ask to expand. It's a new feeling after all those years of PageRank dominance. For example, It sometimes creates a paragraph with a reference to some recent research that according to the PageRank logic should be at the bottom (because almost nobody cites it). It's like the relevance was reborn. Once it was in a primitive sense of the early AltaVista, then Google killed it with PageRank, now when an engine really understands the question, the answers might become relevant in a new sense while being tangential to the reputations of the sources
+1, I bought perplexity pro annual subscription last year, and hardly use it now.
chatGPT+o3 search is much better.
My typical workflow is fire the question to Google AI mode and chatGPT+o3 at the same -- AI mode is fast but meh answer, chatGPT is slower but pretty good answer always.
I would assume basic functionality would be included but advanced functionality would require a subscription to Apple One (or whatever it's called now).
So I wouldn't describe them as kind and benevolent, more that they want to make products people will pay for.
Would I prefer Anthropic to stay independent and go on to be a real alternative to Google, Microsoft and xAI? Certainly.
While I don't believe Apple wants to be in all of Anthropic's current businesses, the crown jewels are the models and employees, which is want they want.
<< At launch, Comet will be available first to subscribers of Perplexity’s $200-per-month Max plan, as well as a small group of invitees that signed up to a waitlist.
Boy i already pay Anthropic that. Now i should pay another 200 bucks to use an ai browser? On top of all these ai saas that want another 20 bucks.
It's kind of wild how the west draws this distinction:
If China does it while being responsible and taking into account cost/benefits on overall human well being, it's Creepy Big Brother Communism.
If the US does it and charges money for it (or makes it 'free' by selling your personal info to untrustworthy companies / selling you junk you don't need) it's an innovative futuristic privilege.
Cold War propaganda was incredibly effective through generations.
edit: changed "If China does it for free" to "If China does it" since it had some distracting assumptions
Can you give an example of what China produces for free to the benefit of overall human well being, as well as instances of people calling Comet "an innovative futuristic privilege?"
no one in this thread is calling the tracking in this innovative. Additionally the government doesn't do anything for "free", if you make 200k a year you are paying $8k/mo or $10/hour just to live in the USA.
> no one in this thread is calling the tracking in this innovative
I didn't say otherwise. But clearly Perplexity (and Google etc) feels there is a market fit for this, so I'm referring to those customers and whatever future customers might come. This is also nothing new. See: basically all existing social media and its consequences.
> Additionally the government doesn't do anything for "free"
I reworded this since it wasn't the point, and had some assumptions made about usage.
Yeah. However wild some of the "America is the land of the free, China is a hellhole" takes are, there is a difference between a tracking system designed to try to sell you holidays and a tracking system used to identify political dissidents.