Perplexity, an AI search engine, is gaining attention as an alternative to ChatGPT. Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity provides citations by default, addressing the hallucination issue in generative AI. The company has become a strong player in a market dominated by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta. Perplexity has evolved rapidly, developing its own search index and building its own LLMs based on open source models. They have also introduced Copilot search, which delivers pinpoint results by considering user preferences. Perplexity’s default model is based on a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 and LLaMA-2. They aim to move away from relying on OpenAI and are considering using LLaMA-2 or Mistral as their base model. The search index size is not as important as the quality of the data, and Perplexity’s search rank mechanism relies on citations from a large language model. Despite competition from Google and Microsoft, Perplexity’s pivot to open source LLM models positions them well in the market.
