I’ve been hearing about the Perplexity search engine, a competitor to Google. www.perplexity.ai I tried it yesterday and it’s really quite good. It’s like ChatGPT with links to sources. Those links are important because the inaccuracy problem with Perplexity is bad, like any other generative AI.

When I’m using Wikipedia for serious research, I fact-check by looking for the blue footnote links and following those to the source articles. Perplexity seems to work the same way, although Perplexity—like all conversational AI—is significantly less accurate than Wikipedia.