In this July 20, 2024 article for his website, Dr. Joseph Mercola writes about Perplexity, an AI-powered “answer engine” that can overtake Google.

Perplexity is part a search engine, and part large language model (LLM). You use it the same way you use Google: type in your keywords, and it will return search information from the internet. Unlike Google, however, you can ask questions in Perplexity, and it will provide you with answers backed by citations.

According to CEO Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity can circumvent the normal LLM tendency to hallucinate or fabricate information. It provides you links to human-created sources on the web, hence allowing you to verify the credibility of the sources.

Mercola says that this capacity sets Perplexity apart from traditional search engines, but one must realize that it is miles away from real reasoning. Perplexity still has its biases, but its state-of-the-art technology is “particularly useful for tasks that require precise and up-to-date information, such as question answering, summarization, and dialogue systems.”

Editor’s Note: We must remember that in the case of AI, “garbage in, garbage out.” The power of Perplexity will depend largely on the data it has been trained on and the data it has access to.

Perplexity’s capabilities are a welcome development. However, we humans must realize that we still have our work cut out for us. We still need to learn how to identify credible sources of information and use critical thinking to determine the level of analysis or thinking being used by the cited sources.

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