FILE - People are reflected in a window of a hotel at the Davos Promenade in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 15, 2024.
“We are actually more of an aggregator of information and providing it to the people with the right attribution,” Srinivas said. But, he added, “It was accurately pointed out by Forbes that they preferred a more prominent highlighting of the source. We took that feedback immediately and updated changes that day itself. And now the sources are more prominently highlighted.”
A self-described “AI bull” who believes that the technology could help make many news organizations more efficient, Lane said the dispute between Perplexity and Forbes is important because it is a “metaphor for what can happen if the people controlling the AI don’t respect the people doing the work.”
Inspired, in part, by his childhood love of Wikipedia, he described Perplexity to the AP as “like a marriage of Wikipedia and ChatGPT” that can instantly answer a person’s questions without the “huge cluttered mess” of Google’s conventional search results. Perplexity relies on existing AI large language models such as those built by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook; and then “post-trains” them.It’s not always clear where the summarized information is coming from. One Perplexity feature called Writing — which enables a user to “generate text or chat without searching the web” — produces lengthy and unsourced commentary, often in the style of a news article.