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#perplexity

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People have low expectations for AI. I asked ChatGPT (paid account, not the free stuff) what would make ChatGPT better. I think the answer is a lot higher quality than what people keep saying one should expect. This is what I got:

--- My Prompt:
With DeepSeek, there are things it is very good at, but it fails quickly and rather spectacularly. Your models tend to break down as well, but somewhere there must be a model that will be able to stay on topic, even when the topic changes, so that conversations move around like human conversations move around subject-to-subject. What would take ChatGPT over the top?

--- ChatGPT reply:
Here’s what it’ll take to get closer to that human-like conversation flow:

  1. Long-Term Memory That Actually Works. Most models either have no memory or they remember only in a clunky, artificial way.

A better memory system would not just recall facts, but contextual relevance—like “we talked about LLM efficiency two days ago and you hate cheerleader language.”

It has to be smart recall, not just data storage.

  1. Thread Awareness
    Imagine a model that can say: “You mentioned DeepSeek earlier. Should I compare it again now that we’ve brought up open-source tools?”
    That requires models to track not just words, but conversational branches—like a tree, not a straight line.

  2. Graceful Fallbacks
    When a model doesn’t know, it should gracefully pivot, not hallucinate or go off-topic. This kind of conversational “stability” is rare and subtle.

Most models that fail “spectacularly,” as you said, are trying to bluff through complexity instead of narrowing scope or clarifying.

  1. Hybrid Contextual ReasoningThe future model needs to reason across subjects rather than switching on and off.

If we're talking about language models, and you shift to science fiction, it should be able to bring up Asimov or neural networks in storytelling—bridging topics, not just hopping between them.

Right now, most models either:

Stay sharp but shallow (good at Q&A, bad at memory), or

Drift into friendly nonsense (chatty, but brittle)

The sweet spot will be a system that grows with you across time and topics—and doesn’t forget what you value in a conversation.

....

When you see stuff posted online meant to minimize the quality of output possible, This was a single question with no leader. I think this is the kind of answer we want from our AI devices.

Thoughts? Feel free to tear this response apart. It needs that kind of human analysis.

#ai#openai#deepseek

#US / Discredited pro-Israel organization targets Wikipedia while ignoring its own documented bias

The ADL published a report titled "Editing for Hate" claiming 30 "bad faith" Wikipedia editors conducted a "coordinated campaign" to insert anti-Israel and pro-Hamas narratives. The ADL is demanding that #Google and other #AI companies refrain from using Wikipedia as a source until Wikipedia takes steps to combat what the ADL considers bias in its coverage of Israel.

Background

Right-wing figures are mounting a coordinated assault on #Wikipedia following #trump's reelection, with #musk calling to "defund" the site after it documented his Nazi-style salute at the inauguration, tech executives like #Perplexity's CEO demanding an "unbiased" alternative, the Heritage Foundation planning to use facial recognition and hacked data to "identify and target" volunteer editors, and the New York Post publishing an editorial citing a "bombshell report" claiming Wikipedia equates "true" with "left wing" - all part of what appears to be a strategic campaign to intimidate and undermine one of the internet's last major platforms for transparent, collaborative information that remains free from paywalls and corporate influence.

The infamously unreliable (as per the Wikipedia itself) pro-Israel Islamophobic organization whose CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, isn't bothered at all by Musk's sieg heil, has been accused of:

[…] Even though the ADL is integrated into community work on a range of issues, it has a history and ongoing pattern of attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, queer people, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence. More disturbing, it has often conducted those attacks under the banner of “civil rights.” This largely unpublicized history has come increasingly to light as activists work to make sense of the ADL’s role in condemning the Movement for Black Lives, Palestinian rights organizing, and Congressional Representative Ilhan Omar, among others.

See droptheadl.org/

The #Wikimedia Foundation responded that they found the ADL report "flawed" with "troubling conclusions that are not supported by the Anti-Defamation League's data"​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​:

[…] “The values of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation reflect our commitment to integrity and accuracy, and we categorically condemn antisemitism and all forms of hate. Though our preliminary review of this report finds troubling and flawed conclusions that are not supported by the Anti-Defamation League's data, we are currently undertaking a more thorough and detailed analysis. It is unfortunate that we were not asked to provide context that might have helped allay some of the concerns raised,”

@palestine
@israel
#IsraelWarCrimes
#GazaGenocide

I basically have a DIY Perplexity setup running in OpenWebUI (which is running politely alongside Plex). I'm using Mistral-Large with web search via SearXNG and the system prompt that Perplexity uses for their Sonar Pro searches.

And since OpenWebUI has an OpenAI-compatible API, I can connect to it from this GPTMobile app on my phone and query my custom search assistant model.

#AI#LLM#LLMs

📜 Large Language Models in #archives : Prompt Engineering for Archivists

Can LLMs assist in writing archival finding aids? 🤔 Paul M. Näger & @dom3nic tested #gpt4o on metadata from the Westphalian Literary Archive.
🔍 Approach:
➡️ Naïve prompt: “Summarize” → Generic, cliché-filled results.
➡️ Advanced prompt engineering: Importing CVs (generated with #perplexity), persona prompting as an archivist, and structured guidance → Much better performance!
#Dhd2025 #Dhd #AI #DigitalHumanities

I ran a little experiment with the free "Deep Research" feature of perplexity.ai
on the question of "State of the Art in Generative Retrieval-Augmented Models in Information Retrieval."

The generated report is shown below.
It consulted 71 academic sources, but only 1 source was listed in the report.
Also, I can browse the list of 71 sources but there was no way to export it and it does not show in the
Perplexity Page below:

perplexity.ai/page/state-of-th

Exploring #AI Knowledge Banks/Stacks #BoodleBox #Perplexity #ChatGPT

One of the more fascinating ways to use AI is to have it interrogate your own files and documents. For example, I created a Rubric Maker using Perplexity's Spaces: As you can see in the screenshot above, it's easy to add SOURCES (FILES or LINKS) to Perplexity. Files are 25MB each and you can add a total of 50, which is a lot.

mglink.org/2025/02/26/explorin

Another Think Coming · Exploring #AI Knowledge Banks/Stacks #BoodleBox #Perplexity #ChatGPTDisclaimer: This is my growing understanding of how these tools work. I could be wrong and hope that if you see a mistake, you will post in the comments or reach out to me via social media (@mguhli…

#Perplexity #Comet #ai
“Just like Perplexity reinvented search, we’re also reinventing the browser,” a Perplexity spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “Stay tuned for updates.”

Sign up below:

Perplexity teases a web browser called Comet | TechCrunch

"AI-powered search engine Perplexity says it's building its own web browser. It'll be called Comet, and it's set to arrive 'soon.'"
techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/perp

TechCrunch · Perplexity teases a web browser called Comet | TechCrunchAI-powered search engine Perplexity says it's building its own web browser. It'll be called Comet, and it's set to arrive 'soon.'
Replied in thread

@mcmullin

I saw Diz at the colonial in 77, and someone posted a tape from the same tour, so I asked #perplexity about the lineup and cited the tape. To its credit, it said it could find no definitive answer and offered a list of "those who played with Diz in the seventies" likely taken from Pablo recordings.

So I replied its list could not be correct given the instrumentation, and offered how it may have been local musicians. It answered this was plausible for late career acts of that era.

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
@olibrendel

In my previous reply I said that the “oops I’m sorry” part is probably the response to being caught hallucinating. It a fact of how thy work, and clearly worse with with smaller, less capable models. That’s why grounding (enriching the context with your own documents) is critical, if you really want to use them for any research work. #DeepSeek discusses #Tiananmen massacre if you give it relevant sources (though maybe not DeepSeeks’s own hosted model).

The “I was programmed” part though seems to be product of the algorithm controlling the workflow, or logic. True to the American mindset of their developers, they’re programmed for both-side-ism. But since the model doesn’t have the data, it hallucinates it.

These tools are a disaster for research when used trivially by people who are not experts on the topic, don’t know how to guide the model using system prompts or ground it in facts (reliable diverse sources).

I’ve seen worse produced by #Perplexity for example, which is grounded in web searches. There the problem is the sources it prefers. If I ask it if #Israel is committing genocide in #Gaza, or occupying Palestinian lands, it’s very likely to use some Israeli sources to answer these questions, often the non peer reviewed Zionist Jewish virtual library which is very difficult to get rid of. To get it to quote any of the Khalidis or more contemporary research is hopeless.

When I asked llama3.2 if it’s conceivable that 2nd and 3rd generation Israeli holocaust survivors be involved in a genocide, it completely denied such a possibility due to Israel’s high moral standards, rule of law, adherence to international law etc 🤣 … the data about Israel not respecting any UN resolution ever, apparently never been fed to any of these models.

@palestine @israel @histodons @academicchatter