But Sam Altman said back in the GPT-3.5 days that exactly this will happen to all GPT wrapper startups. [0]
[0]: https://x.com/ai_for_success/status/1779930498623742187
In theory maybe, in some tentative hope that the RAG would patch the hallucination problem - but the LLM showed such a low effective equivalent IQ that its usage was always incredibly frustrating. (It could have improved recently - I am not sure. Some tests have indicated it as especially dumb even not long ago.)
The differences between Opus 4.8, Opus 5.0 and Opus 5.5 are huge.
You would go to it, but results showed much more work was needed - also in RAG. Which became a general focus in the community, for the many problem it may solve and the many it could help fixing. Some found better formulas for RAG, others swamped. Perplexity made it a flag, but in a factual large company. And the problem with "fake sources and citations" is still there, while mitigated in the full complex systems - hallucination is still a benchmarked effect in LLM ANNs, and blunders from excessive trust are still recorded.
Literally every cited number was flat out wrong. Some people replied to point out the mistakes but as I recall no one called out the Perplexity elephant in the room specifically.
I'll have to find it again, it was such an absurdly ironic scenario it felt like performance art or something.
Lol, that's not true.
They always were a "literally who". A lot of paid propaganda on blogs and even shills that were coming to sites like this, on Twitter, etc... were writing stuff for pennies per post (lmao) about how much they used it for this and that but it was all lies.
But people were not using them, regular non-tech folks have ZERO awareness of their brand.
Besides some testing, I've never used it too for different reasons - I don't like my chat history and questions stored at some third party vendor that's just a startup.
They might get relegated to niche use cases, or pivot like Midjourney. I'm glad they exist, even for the sake of fighting against the duopoly that's just forming with OpenAI and Anthropic.
Perplexity can fight Gemini for that 3rd spot. Gemini is kind of fumbling it, so they have a real fighting chance, imho.
Perplexity has now become a speciality tool used for a few use cases primarily via third party models (unsure if they are still continuing to develop their own mdoels and where they rank)
Google on the other hand is still actively trying to develop SOTA models (or at least 3rd best) and also is widely used amongst cost sensitive projects.
I see no comparison between them worth putting them alongside each other.
If anything Anthropic and Open AI are at a severe disadvantage. Open AI at least provides backend model services for Siri. No idea what Anthropic does.
Do they? I thought that was Google/Gemini now.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/apple-google-ai-siri-gemini....
They can still be disqualified culturally speaking, as in, yeah every time you unbox a new smartphone it forces you to accept terms and conditions, yet you never open Gemini or Siri. That's great for the someone that will get that promotion and pay raise.
An investor sees that app installs are increasing and that's "great for business," yet it's shallow because the real app usage isn't that high.
"How come we have so many new installs but Claude is far more used?" They have all that telemetry, they should know that for certain.
Google and Apple can force installation and even terms and conditions agreement, but they cannot fake user commitment.
> Google and Apple completely own this space.
Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer, and once it became technically inferior (IE7+) to others, Chrome and Firefox ate the market share of it. Then it was Chrome all the way in.
Internet Explorer became "the browser you loved to hate," and they even did a campaign on that motto.
The technical debt was so heavy, they had to start over with Edge, and it still doesn't gain market share as it is expected. Just because it comes deeply ingrained in the mobile OS that still doesn't grant them ability to win the hearts of the users.
I'm one of those that delete the Gemini app every now and then (it becomes auto-installed with each OS update, it's hostile behavior).
Gemini and Siri still have to be good even if it's forced on our devices. We already know Siri lost it[0]. Siri is comically bad.
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That said, I stick to Claude in the terminal for 99% of my LLM usage.
I also think that this is going to be very useful and many startups are entering this space of agent teammates with persistent memory.
Claude and ChatGPT basically offer the same functionality now, but with better models and more features.
They’re going to be sold for parts at some point at a valuation where common shareholders get zero.
I remember a lot of engineers joining with the promise of easy money and stock options “worth” millions. Now the company is basically irrelevant.
For some reason, I feel like it has gotten worse than it was. I don't know if it's just me.
Maybe chatgpt/claude just got increasingly better. Yet still feel they should have been able to keep up with it at least? but now they are just so much behind in terms of user experience and general product quality.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/perplexity_ai/comments/1orar1a/upda...
Honest question… what IP does Perplexity have that gives them any moat whatsoever left in this increasingly commoditized market?
A lot of the early hype was driven by how liberally they were handing out free Pro memberships. For a while, every telco, bank, etc. was handing it out as a free promotional offer. I don't think anyone I know that raved about it ever gave them a single dime.
Their product was definitely cool for a few months, but they had zero moat to begin with (considering how quickly the frontier labs caught up), and the conversion rate on those free sign-ups must have been abysmal, especially after they nerfed the free Pro subscriptions on both quality and quantity dimensions, and their own "politically neutral" DeepSeek R1 distillation didn't pan out.
ChatGPT has the name, and Anthropic has ... the writing style is less cringe? (Well, it used to be, anyway...)