I’ve been working with artificial intelligence (AI) since the 1970s, when Lisp was state-of-the-art. Lately, like everyone else, I’ve been looking at AI a lot more closely. While it’s nifty and getting genuinely useful, it can still blunder, like the time Google’s AI Overviews recommended users to eat “at least one small rock per day.” AI can also lose its mind, such as when Grok went totally MechnaHitler. Even when I tell J. Random Chatbot to summarize an Otter.ai transcription of a meeting, it gets things wrong.
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Therefore, I treat the results of my AI queries with great caution. However, I found an AI chatbot whose work I can easily double-check to ensure it’s in the ballpark of being accurate: Perplexity.
That may not sound like much, but it’s a critical feature. Because AI chatbots are trained on information scraped from the web, they are all capable of hallucinating or spouting errant nonsense. For instance, a recently published AI-generated list of the 15 best novels to read this summer included 10 novels that didn’t exist. Whoops.
Sure, Perplexity also hallucinates, but it values data from trustworthy sources. Here’s what it can do, and why it’s my favorite AI chatbot.
I’m very picky about my research programs. I have reason. My first business, which I founded in 1978, was named Researchers at Large. In those days, I used the online databases of the day — DIALOG, NASA RECON, and OCLC — to do paid academic research. My research skills remain a major reason why I’m still a successful journalist. Today, Perplexity is good enough that it has become the first AI chatbot I trust as a genuine research tool.
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For example, chances are you’ve never heard of him, but I did some of my doctoral work on Dr. Norman Leys, an early 20th-century East African anti-imperialist. Perplexity provided a decent summary of his career, and, importantly, pointed me to the academic studies that cover his life in more detail. Other AI chatbots provided me with much broader and sometimes inaccurate information, but they didn’t disclose their sources. Because I studied his life, I could tell the difference. Most people would never realize they’d been led astray.
By the way, before you commit to using any AI chatbot, I recommend that you do the same. Ask it detailed questions about a topic you know very well, whether it’s Pittsburgh Steelers football in the ’70s, Star Wars movies, or clog dancing. If it provides accurate answers to obscure questions and clearly sources the information, you can be more certain that it’s worth using.
I found that Perplexity does this with all the topics it covers. Whether you’re doing academic, investment, or sports research, it can handle complex queries and provide accurate, detailed, and context-aware answers.
Another element that makes Perplexity great for research is its sources. Most notably, it gathers its data from academic studies and other reliable sources. It doesn’t consider Joe Random’s comments to be just as valid as Dr. Josephine Expert’s refined answer.
The free Focus feature also lets you fine-tune your searches and avoid some sources. When I was looking up Norman Leys, for example, I told Perplexity to use only academic sources, so I could avoid Wikipedia and other less reliable sites. Or, if you need helpful content on how to fix your washing machine, you can set it to focus only on YouTube videos.
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Since I first looked at Perplexity, other major chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini have significantly improved their citation and source transparency features. While they’re closing the gap, Perplexity’s attribution is still better at telling you precisely where it got its answers. For example, while it might still pull part of an answer from Reddit, it will tell you where to find the specific post it’s quoting from. You can then look for yourself to see if you think the information is trustworthy.
Let me add, though, that the accuracy of all chatbots is on the decline. I find that their answers now are less trustworthy than when I first checked in with Perplexity in May 2024. That’s because AI’s large language models (LLMs) are now “learning” from AI-written results. The result is garbage-in/garbage out, or — as it’s more formally known in AI circles — we’re already going into Model Collapse.
The moral of the story? When Perplexity gives you an answer, dig deep into those citations. You may find, as I do sometimes now, that the citations themselves are based on AI slop.
Finally, Perplexity has one good feature that, as far as I know, no other AI has. It tells me when it can’t find an answer. The others all too often make up answers from whole cloth. While prone to hallucinations like all the LLMs, Perplexity appears to try to stick to the facts.
Here’s another subject close to my heart that most people don’t know that well: I feel Shoeless Joe Jackson should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Unless you’re a hard-core baseball fan, you’ll most likely know of him from the movie Field of Dreams. While Perplexity doesn’t mention the movie or the book it was based on, W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, the chatbot did a good job summarizing the arguments, pro and con, for letting him back into baseball. Now that Major League Baseball has reinstated Shoeless Joe, along with a guy you probably have heard of, Pete Rose, Joe should finally make it.
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Where Perplexity stands out from the rest is that it also provided additional questions to continue my search, including: What is the history of Shoeless Joe Jackson’s ban from baseball? What other players have been banned from baseball? And “What is the Black Sox Scandal?”
Whatever topic you’re interested in, Perplexity will help you dig deeper into the subject.
As you examine an issue, the Collections feature helps you organize your findings and thoughts in a structured manner. You can keep your research notes to yourself or share them with up to five co-workers or friends.
Free users default to Sonar Large with limited access to advanced models for a few queries per day. Perplexity AI Pro ($20/month) users can manually select their models or use “Best Mode” to automatically choose the model that Perplexity thinks is best for their query. Pro users can also use “Pro search” to dig deeper with its internet search, with up to three times the number of sources for the usual query.
Perplexity Max ($200/month) includes all the above and access to more advanced AI models such as OpenAI o3-pro and Claude Opus 4.
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This multimodel approach enables you to select the best model for your specific needs, thereby enhancing the flexibility and accuracy of the responses. The Pro version allows you to toggle between different LLMs, providing you with a tailored search experience or enabling you to compare answers from different chatbots without exiting Perplexity.
To switch between models, take the following steps:
- Open Perplexity AI on your browser and log in to your account.
- Click the gear icon in the interface’s bottom-left corner to open the Settings menu.
- In the Settings menu, look for the AI Model section under the Perplexity Pro subsection.
- Select from the available models.
- After selecting your preferred model, ensure that you save the changes.
What actually happens when using another AI model? First, Perplexity takes your question and works with your selected model to understand your question. Then, Perplexity’s web search engine, which, for my money, is the best web searcher available today, gathers the relevant web content. Perplexity then feeds this back into your chosen model, and that model provides the answer. Perplexity then delivers that response to you and adds citations, if required, so you know where the answers came from.
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In addition, Pro users and above can create images with Perplexity. They can also use other models such as DALL-E 3, Stable Diffusion XL, and Flux1 to make images.
Of course, you could use the other chatbots directly. Perplexity’s value lies in combining real-time web search with model-based synthesis, grounding answers in up-to-date, sourced information, and providing interactive features such as follow-up questions, document/image uploads, and context-aware threads. Lastly, it’s more cost-effective to use Perplexity alone rather than subscribing to multiple LLMs.
The one caveat is that if the model has any special features, you won’t be able to use them from Perplexity. So, for example, ChatGPT enables you to assemble GPTs — custom AI assistants that can work with other programs such as Zapier, Google Sheets, or Slack — but you can’t get to these from Perplexity.
While many chatbots now pull information from the web in real time, Perplexity, which has been at this longer than the others, still does the best job of pulling in current information.
Perplexity updates its search data in real time for each individual query. When you submit a question, Perplexity performs a live web search, retrieving the latest information from trusted sources at the moment you ask, rather than relying on a fixed database or cached results. This approach ensures answers reflect the most up-to-date facts, news, and developments. This is in stark contrast to most LLMs that operate from a dataset frozen in the past.
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The tool also uses contextual search to bridge the gap between traditional search engines and LLMs. This enables you to make structured searches that can help you find exactly what you’re looking for, rather than simply hoping that the right keywords will give you the answer you want on the first page of results.
I much prefer this user experience over Google’s search experience, which tends to be cluttered with ads and AI-generated slop that may or may not answer my query.
I’m not the only one who prefers Perplexity for search.
A recent Harvard Business School case study, “Perplexity: Redefining Search,” found that “Perplexity had rapidly evolved from a modest startup into a popular ‘answer engine’ that directly challenges Google and other search engines.” The study highlights how Perplexity’s core features, real-time web search, answer synthesis, and citations, are driving user migration from traditional search engines. The report credits Perplexity’s “user-centricity, speed, and quality” as essential to its rapid adoption and trust among consumers and enterprises..
If you don’t need Perplexity to search the web or news, and just need an answer to, say, a programming question, you can click the Focus button and change it to “Writing mode.” This will give you results only from Perplexity’s LLMs. The results will resemble those provided by ChatGPT and other AI chatbots.
Overall, Perplexity AI is my pick over other chatbots because it excels at detailed research, but it can also translate between languages, generate document summaries, and answer both simple and complex questions. Plus, you can use it to do the usual AI tricks, such as creating poems, code, email messages, and articles.
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It doesn’t do everything. Unlike other chatbots, such as Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT with DALL-E 3, Perplexity does not include free AI image creation functionality. You have to subscribe to Perplexity Pro or Max for basic AI-image creation tools, and they’re not equal to the best AI image generators.
That said, if you need reliable, in-depth answers to your queries, it’s my top choice. Although it may not receive as much attention as Google, Meta, Microsoft, or OpenAI, the results speak for themselves.
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