Wired: AI startup Perplexity is 'BS machine'

Katie Drummond, Wired’s global editorial director, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the magazine's investigation into AI search startup Perplexity.

[ScenariosInAI]

This CNBC guy is the absolute worst. Whenever I hear him talk about Tech he is the most consistently uninformed person and asks the dumbest questions.

[bobbydelrio]

Perplexity is amazing. This is a hit piece funded by a competitor.

[BlizzardzRS]

Perplexity is a great product.

Sounds like the presenter didn’t like the answer he got when he searched for himself.

[PeterSedesse]

Funny Joe used the phrase ' garbage in, garbage out' without realizing that is the truth, his query was garbage, so Perplexity gave him a garbage response.

[slytherben]

Perplexity is my favorite. It gives me the best results. Someone funded a hit piece

[furtherpictures]

Disagree. This is almost hit-piece level unbalanced. Perplexity has been super useful for me. And it footnotes all sources, doens't just scrape reddit. It's a great product.

[nocodeexplorer]

The anchor seems to not know what he is talking about

[wonsunparque]

Why is the host so angry? All of these AI tools explicitly say that it can be inaccurate.

[wm]

Joe is a terrible interviewer. He has no idea what a.i does, he himself spew misinformation all the time😂😂😂😂

[dennismajor]

I agree it does feel like a hit job. I very rarely have any complaint with my perplexity search results.

[otuedonuduaghan]

I had to check the comments because I use perplexity all the time and I love it. So to call it trash makes no sense whatsoever 😂.

[picola]

If it’s “garbage in garbage out”, then if you go directly to the information source, it’s still garbage. Only now you’ve spent precious brain cycles having to look through ads to get to it.

I don’t use Perplexity to find the right answer immediately, I use Perplexity to help me get closer to the right answer more efficiently without having to do manual searches and looking at irrelevant content.

[gouthamgv]

Why is it confusing? This seems like a coordinated effort to bring down perplexity

[neelanpather]

This feels like a hit job. Perplexity is great! It is a thoughtfully designed knowledge discovery engine. It's for the curious!

[tvm]

Joe has given us a demo of how a discussion between Luddites would look like. There is an ongoing bet in the AI community on whether Joe will be replaced by a bot before his natural retirement.

[gerarddemers]

I stopped after 2:31 into the video. To quote him "I was looking for sentience" and found he had none.

[MegaLeoben]

The presenter just convinced me to purchase a perplexity subscription where I wasn’t going to before. 😂

[jasonturner]

These tech experts can't even explain what is wrong with the product. He probably asked what color is the shirt that i'm wearing right now? and it gave him 10 different colors and told him where to buy it.

[srujandesi]

What ever thr topic is on the planet. Joe manages to make it political. 😂

[jamesaspinwall]

It is odd that attack on Perplexity by CNBS. The anchor admits he doesn't know much, then jumps to the valuation that has nothing to do with the criticism on quality of the product. I use many of the LLMs, and I like Perplexity because it reads searched web pages and present a summary of the sources. If you don't trust or like a source, you can tell Perplexity to ignore it. The additional followup questions at the bottom is quite helpful too.