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can someone explain what perplexity value is ? They seem like a thin wrapper on top of big AI names, and yet i find them often mentioned as equivalent to the likes of opena ai / anthropic / etc, which build foundational models.

It's very confusing.



Their main claim to fame was blending LLM+search well early on. Everyone has caught up on that one though. The other benefit is access to variety of models - OAI, Anthropic etc. i.e. you can select the LLM for each LLM+search you do.

Lately they've been making a string of moves thought that smell of desperation though.


They were doing web search before open ai/anthropic, so they historically had a (pretty decent) unique selling point.

Once chat gpt added web browsing, I largely stopped using perplexity


They are a little bit different because it operates more like a search tool. Its the first real company that is a good replacement for Google.


What about ChatGPT's search functionality? Built straight in to the product. Works with GPT-4o.


They existed before OpenAI released that and they allow the use of other models like Claud or DeepSeek for example




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