Perplexity AI Tutorial: Why you don't need Google and ChatGPT anymore

Key Takeaways

this tool is better than CAD GPT and Google combined I believe it is I'm Tim and I've been exploring AI tools to help you get the best out of Technology you might have heard of perplexity but haven't been convinced yet to try it out but it's actually super easy to get started without even setting up an account in the next few minutes I'll walk you through perplexity Ai and show you why it might be your new favorite tool in this video I will try to convince you that perplexity AI is the only tool you need to do research going forward first off what exactly is perplexity AI it's an AI powered search engine and answer engine that provides concise and accurate responses to your queries it was founded by former AI researchers from meta and open Ai and has gotten investments from leading figures at y combinator figma Nvidia and Jeff Bezos what makes everyone so excited about perplexity perplexity AI uses multiple leading large language models including GPT 40 Cloud 3.5 sonar Mr Large and its own custom models to deliver precise answers it's designed to bridge the gap between traditional search engines like Google and AI chatbots offering a more efficient way to access and synthesize up-to-date information unlike traditional search engines perplexity AI offers real-time information by indexing the web daily ensuring the latest news and updates one of the standout features is its conversational interface you ask questions in natural language and perplexity responds in kind almost like having chat GPT sit on top of Google and do your searches for you perplexity provides inline citations allowing you to verify information sources directly adding a layer of trust and transparency often lost with chat GPT how does it really compare to Giant like chat GPT and Google for example if you ask perplexity about a trending news topic it not only gives you a concise answer but also pulls in the most recent and relevant articles from across the web with perplexity you can ask follow-up questions and keep the conversation going without losing context perplexity AI offers multiple search Focus modes whether you need academic papers YouTube videos Reddit threads or more it's got you covered if you opt for perplexity Pro you get even more advanced capabilities like file uploads image generation and access to multiple AI models what makes perplexity so great is that it not only understands complex questions and can give you a concise upto-date answer but it also provides links to all its sources this transparency allows you to see how it came up with the answer making it much less of a black box than CAD GPT you can verify the information and use the provided sources for your own articles or thesis now let's see perplexity AI in action all right so let's go to perplexity doai and this is what you'll be greeted with so here you have your search input and let's just ask a question so what is quantum Computing and obviously there's some typos in there but it it gets it right anyway and here we get our answer so we have a couple things that are of note so you get llm interpreting your question which is nice and that it's actually searching the internet for answers so here are your sources so you can click on the sources it shows you the sources that it used to generate your answer and it gives you a answer like a human would and here gives you a description of the topic and it cites the sources in line which is really great because you can check for yourself if you trust the sources and also you know copy them for your thesis or homework or whatever so what's really nice now is you can ask follow-up question something you cannot do in Google so let's ask can you give me the latest developments and it knows what you're talking about because it remembers your last question and here it tells you the list of the latest developments and again you can see the sources and check for yourself if you trust the sources and now some very useful features um you can search for images videos and also generate an image so let's click on search images so this is just an image search relating to the topic here are some videos you can search on the topic break breakthroughs in Quantum Computing and you can even generate an image but you need the pro for that which I didn't sign up for yet so now something super nice is that there's different search modes it's Al that's also called Focus modes so let's open a new thread so up top here new thread here you can see there's a button set called Focus so let's do latest developments in Quantum Computing and for example we could focus on academic literature so let's choose academic other things are social video math and writing social might be Reddit threads and similar videos you know might be YouTube but we want academic papers because we're writing an abstract for a conference for example so let's go there and here you can see that the answer has become much more technical Quantum Computing has seen significant advancement in recent years with the worldman Spang various exp of the field and then here's some rather technical details we can check the sources so for example we have semantic scholar and archive which uh the scientists among you know as one of the leading platforms for scientific Publications in physics engineering and computer science so let's do the same thing for another Focus so let's do again latest developments in Quantum Computing and we want social so let's see what this gives us so as you can see the sources are now Reddit mostly and this is much less technical than before and we can check the sources and we see different Reddit threads and this can be extremely useful because for example results on Google might be out of date but discussions on Reddit might be useful to find a new tool so for example let's do best AI video generator and we'll do social because there might be discussions on Reddit about the topic and there we go so the sources include threads on Reddit on best I AI generated video based AI video generator for faceless channels AI video generators and so on so here are the pieces of software that I suggested with the uh sources and this seems fairly useful capwing Runway ml clip talk Pro Lumen 5 pictory and so on so this is fairly useful because you won't get these answers from academic papers for example so now as a YouTube content creator I might want to look for YouTube videos on a certain topic so as you know I made some videos on crew AI so let's look for latest videos about crew Ai and we're not going to do social but we're going to do video Let's see and here we go we even get the thumbnails and here are some key points on the latest developments for crei and all the sources are from YouTube so all these are videos from YouTube about crei and perplexedly knows what they're talking about and here for example it's referencing a video about crei and rack retriever augmented Generation by a YouTuber called Brandon and lastly there's the option to generate images same as with a jet gbt pro subscription um I don't have the subscription right now but you can ask perplexity to generate images for you and then you just click on generate image but of course it prompts me to sign up for the professional plan now something very cool so let's go to one of these articles so for example we're going to go to this archive article and download the actual PDF so we're going to save this and now we're going to open a new thread or actually we can ask a follow-up question and attach a PDF so with the free version of perplexity we can do this just three times a day but I'm going to attach this paper and ask a question about it can you please summarize this paper for me and there we go this took around 5 to 10 seconds explains the paper to you so it read the paper and it explains its contents to you now the sources are just that paper the paper typ of quantum Computing Hardware is in the cloud should comput computational chemist care um and then it tells you the key points Quantum Computing and chemistry types of quantum Hardware super Computing super conducting quantum computers and so on so very very useful if you don't have time to read the entire paper but you might get more insights than just reading the abstract so we could for example say can you please please tell me more about the challenges which is point4 here and it still reads through the paper and gives you more details about the challenges so it's like chatting with the PDF document with the scientific article which is much quicker than reading the entire article yourself if you just want specific answers from the article okay so now here's a great one let's say you're a tech person which I know many of you guys are and we have some bug or some software issue that we want to solve and instead of going through many many search results on Google or reading different forms like stack Overflow to find the answer we can just paste our error here so let's say we have this error which is an error that some windows users might see pip is not recognized as an internal or external command so let's search for all and then here are some suggestions as to what the answer might be and the great thing is is that you can ask follow-up questions so let's say you don't know what Anaconda is so let's say you ask I don't know what Anaconda is and it will tell you what Anaconda is tell you the fees and so and then you can say cond install didn't work and it tells you potential solutions for your problem so this is really great it's like having your own personal tech support for your own bugs and now I want to show you some Advanced features which I think is super neat so aside from the home area of perplexity there's a discover area so you click here on Discover on the left and it's basically like a news feed tailored to you so you can make it yours save your interest and look at these articles and those are perplexity generated articles about certain topics with the sources about the topic so this is really great as it's you know sifting through the internet to give you relevant information about a topic that interests you another really cool feature you can use is the collections feature so if you go to the library here it shows you your past queries and you can click on collections so let's say I want to go to Indonesia the winter India trip that an emoji and the prompt is I want to make a travel plan and for a TW Monon trip to Indonesia to go surfing and Hiking let's say and then let's get started so what are the best times to go surf in Indonesia and here it tells me that the dry season from April to October is the best but I don't actually want to do that so I'm going to ask a followup question what are the conditions surfwise in the winter and it tells me the worlds are a little bit less consistent there's some region variations so maybe I'm going to ask for the best surf spots for intermediates and here it suggests a couple of spots let's specify specifically intermediates wanting to surf in December and January and here it tells me exactly what I want to know and if I go back to the Indonesia trip collection I can now ask other questions what are some nice hikes in Bali and basically I'm collecting all the information on my trip to Indonesia in this collection and here are the threats and then maybe I also want to look for hotels and generally plan my my stay so I can say what are the best options for a Solo Traveler wanting to serf but also work remotely okay it understood allo traveler I'm going to specify amend Solo Traveler to Indonesia here are the best destinations so maybe it can help me find a hostel let's try what are some good host for digital Nomads in Bali and it tells me the best hostiles for digital n and Bali and now I can go back to my collection and I have all the threads that I just started nice hikes and Bali best times to go surf in Indonesia and the best options for a Solo Traveler wanting to Surf and work remotely and I can also invite people to collaborate on this collection so we can let's say I want to do the strip with a friend or my girlfriend so we can collect threats together and the last thing I'll just mention for most of you this won't be important but if you're a developer you can actually test the performance of different language models with perplexity in the perplexity lab so all you have to do is go to labs. perplexity doai you can communicate with uh perplexity in the playground and test different llms against each other and time their performance so let's try to about space travel about inter inter space travel so by default is using llama 3.1 serer and let's see how it's doing okay so you can see the tokens it used the tokens per second and the time it took to give you an answer so we can do the same thing in let's say mixol and we'll just copy the same question and as you can see it was quicker but used more tokens and it used more tokens per second but in general it was quicker with mix and you can compare the answers if you have any questions or comments about perplexity AI or want me to cover another tool in the next video leave me a comment if you want to understand how llms work and maybe write your own AI code in the future check out my video on how to learn machine learning thanks for watching and see you next time a