Wait, however … Perplexity – like the other IA search engines – has been criticized to hallucinate and be mistaken.
We welcome this criticism, because it is the best way for us to improve continuously. In reality, errors explain a small fraction of the results, and our answers are much more precise than 10 blue links polluted by decades of content optimized in SEO. [In response to a follow-up request, Perplexity did not provide further details on error rates, but Jesse Dwyer, a spokesman, said that reliability is improving constantly]. But the fact is that precision and confidence will not become more important than AI is integrated into more of our lives, so it is something on which we focus tirelessly. We cannot get there without these comments.
Perplexity also reads press articles protected by copyright with its “Discover” section. Do you understand why some publishers are upset?
We answered this before. See our blog article on how we respect robots.txt [a file added to websites that specifies whether web crawlers should access their content].
The perplexity assistant for Android and iOS seems “agentic” because he can take measures. What is the size of a change?
AI is good enough to answer questions now. What should really be done is to make AI take measures. People use the word “agents”; You can go with what you want – “agent” or “assistant” – but in the end, he must chain tools and perform actions. That’s why we are [also building a] Navigator and assistant on iOS, Android.
Do Apple and Google have too much control over their mobile platforms compared to foreigners who seek to build agents?
With iOS, it is particularly difficult, because you have to chain a bunch of event api. On iOS, mail, calendar, reminders, podcasts, everything that is natively available via Apple SDK [software development kit used to build applications]So that you can really write emails, plan meetings, move meetings, define reminders, all of this, open podcasts quite easily. You can do podcasts … “Get me the one where Mark Andreessen discusses the bench with Joe Rogan.” This can get it fairly quickly.
It is especially difficult because you cannot access other applications. IOS is not very different from Android, because AI cannot access most applications on Android (which means that the perplexity assistant can interact with certain applications more easily than others). [But] Thread applications can create their SDK to be accessible on Android SDK. For example, our Android system can display a song on Spotify. On iOS, you can only be linked to a specific spotify song, and you must manually start playing audio.
Oh, so it is the applicants of application that retains the AI agents?
This is the challenge. If people offer us APIs – say, open, Uber, Doordash or Instacart table – where we can access information in the application without even having to open the application. At the back, it’s quite powerful. For example, if we can access Uber information and find that Uber comfort does not cost more than 5 or 10% Uber X, then we can simply book Uber comfort for you – if it is a preference that you define on perplexity.
