Special Edition: Which AI app is like, WOW the best, for quick research questions?
It's Perplexity; for now.
Dear Reader
This was too long to put in the main Sunday-is-Funday edition of Antonym, but I think you’ll find it useful so here’s a SPECIAL EDITION. Let me know what you think…
Antony
Which AI app is best for quick research questions?
The short answer
Perplexity. A free-for-now search engine and chatbot founded by ex-Google and Meta AI people.
The longer answer: what I found…
Amidst the noise about AI tools, which is the best app to use if you actually want to find out things? A bit of research, a question you can’t quite seem to find the answer on a standard search engine.
Comparing different AI systems is difficult. Because of the complexity of the tech behind them, the different ways that they have been trained and are developing.
In a loose experiment, I asked six AI chatbots something obscure but not ridiculously difficult, about one of my favourite apps, Roam Research. It was fantastically hyped when it launched but started slowing down in terms of new features rolling out.
Roam is too niche to be covered by tech journalists, so there are no easy answers there. There were clues on standard Google search, but they were buried in long message-board discussion threads with endless disagreements and painful grammar. It was hard for me to see what was really happening. There are some articles: long and self-involved pieces about people’s personal knowledge management systems. I was frustrated.
So what could the main AI chatbots tell me?
I put the same question to six apps:
“What difficulties did Roam Research experience that slowed its development and popularity?”
The apps were:
Bing!
ChatGPT (premium with web browsing option)
Claude+
Claude100K
Google Bard
Perplexity
I believe that both the Claude apps don’t have a live connection to the web, and like ChatGPT’s normal version, they won’t know about events beyond 2021. However, they would have some data about the question.
Bing!
Cost. Free. You may need to sign up and get a Microsoft Edge browser and an account to access it the AI chat function.
Verdict. A great daily AI-search tool that gives quick answers, links to sources and suggestions to explore a topic further. You need to push it to get the best results.
Bing has integrated ChatGPT and gives answers with up-to-date reference links to articles it has referenced. It’s faster than using the ChatGPT premium version that uses Bing (though slower than Perplexity), and free.
It carefully qualified the response, which was based on discussions of Roam Research on Reddit, with a warning about the subjectivity of the views
.
ChatGPT
Cost: $20/month for premium. This gives access to GPT-4 via chat, a more powerful model than the freely available GPT-3.5.
Verdict: Not ready for daily use, but likely to improve.
I used the new web-connected version of ChatGPT, which is available as part of the premium service. Surprisingly, given how good it is at most things, ChatGPT’s web browser connection was much slower than Bing, which it uses for search engines. It was like having a clever but hesitant go-between doing the search for me. At first, ChatGPT thought for a long time and couldn’t answer the question at all, responding, “Reading Content Failed”. But after a second attempt and a couple of minutes, it returned a comprehensive answer more like Perplexity’s longer, well-structured analysis and with links to the sources.
Claude+ (Anthropic)
Cost: Accessed via the Poe app, which is £20/month.
Verdict: Unreliable for this kind of search.
Claude is a fast and often very useful chatbot; but for this question, it simply threw its virtual hands up and said: “Dunno!”
One might see this as a refusal to speculate based on Reddit discussions or just drawing a blank. Either way, not useful.
Claude 100K (Anthropic)
Cost: Accessed via the Poe app which is £20/month and gives access to a lot of AI models.
Verdict: Spectacular response but contained very convincing lies. This model is good for a lot of things, but not this kind of research.
Claude 100K is the bigger sibling of Claude. At lightning speed, it gave the most detailed answer, much of which was accurate or at least valid as analysis, but dropped an absolute clanger of a hallucination in there, claiming Roam Research had had legal difficulties over database copyright. I asked it for more information, and it elaborated with more lies. I asked it for references, and it came up with a list of tech websites and articles with links. Amazing! Except the links were 404 pages and the articles didn’t exist.
If you’re a Succession fan, then Claude 100K is Stewie, Kendal’s stylish, super-smart, but utterly-untrustable friend.
Google Bard
Cost: Free.
Verdict: A straight answer, but not as useful for research.
It’s hard to understand how Google Bard is evolving. There’s more power, data and computing potential available to Google than any of its rivals, and yet it still seems like a limited demo, that they are holding something back. The response came back fast and was, like Claude 100K, detailed in its analysis of possible factors. The lack of links to references (unless you then did a Google search) made it harder to trust and less useful as a research tool.
Perplexity
Cost. Free.
Verdict: The winner in this experiment. A detailed answer is returned quickly with links to references.
Perplexity has become my starting place for answering questions or doing light research in the past couple of weeks. Its information is current; it’s fast, gives links to sources and offers helpful follow-up questions to continue your research. The Co-Pilot mode is great for going deeper on a subject – it gives more options and almost coaches you in your research – but is limited to five questions every four hours.
Conclusion
Perplexity is the best of these tools for asking questions and doing light research. Bing! and Google Bard are also very good, but you must work a little harder to get what you need and check answers.
With all generative AI apps you need to double-check the facts they offer to avoid “hallucinations”. I know this, but I still get fooled, especially by apps like Claude100K that are incredibly fast and convincingly eloquent. Just like Stewie.
