Before this story, I had no opinion on Perplexity.
Now I hope this product dies in a fire.
Oh, okay. Well obviously fuck this guy. I can’t imagine being enough of an asshole to see staff go on strike and your first thought is ‘let me pitch my shitty AI!’
It’s the entire point of AI, to replace the workforce.
No it isn’t. It’s the entire point of some (well, many) modern AI companies, granted. But “the entire point of AI”? absolutely not.
That’s the entire point of capitalism. To generate as much profit from as little expense as possible. Unfortunately capitalism is predicated on a human workforce earning income to pay for goods and services, so at some point the economic engine will shutdown and capitalism will have killed capitalism. Either way, once the level of robotics + dumb AI is more cost effective than the available workforce in any role, that role will be eliminated. Once general AI is achieved and (especially once) the robots can build and repair themselves, the proles will either get star trek or whoever commands the killbots (including an AI) will rule humanity and inherit civilization.
NOTE: could happen at any time, but my bet’s on it not happening for many decades; possibly not for hundreds or thousands of years.
If your entire workforce is ai and you don’t have any humans then how do humans who don’t have a job pay for your product?
The entire concept of replacing the workforce with AI falls apart when you spend more than 2 seconds thinking about it. Only way it would work is if we actually got rid of the entire concept of money.
They’re not thinking that far ahead. They’re thinking “how can I make the lines go up this quarter?”
No doubt many of them understand that you need people with enough money to buy products or the economy stagnates. But they don’t see it as their problem right now. Their problem right now is to make the line go up by any means they can. It’s similar to how the owners must understand that climate change will fuck everyone if left unchecked, but they don’t see it as their own problem right now, so none of them take any steps to avoid disaster. Capitalism doesn’t contain mechanisms for coordinating actions towards the greater good. Instead it creates many “tragedy of the commons” type situations.
Corps have been complaining for years already that people aren’t buying enough. Millenials are killing this industry and that industry because we don’t consume enough - “enough” being whatever level they’ve decided we should consume. They feel entitled to our dollars, whether or not their product or service is any good.
If they were smart, companies would lower prices to be more competitive and incentivize people to buy more. Instead they’ve doubled down and posted armed guards at the store exits to intimidate the customers they have left. They’ve slipped data collection into every interaction. It’s pretty obvious they’re not playing the long game anymore.
Damn. I liked Perplexity. Sucks to delete it, but this guy can fuck directly off.
I’m going to have to try the selfhosted variants now. What a huge piece of shit.
Any recommendations?
GPT4All and then any model you like. I like mistral.
Ditto! I run an old server, but would be willing to upgrade and self host a service instead of paying this ass hat any more money!
Okay, guys. Thanks!
I prefer MistralAI models. All their models are uncensored by default and usually give good results. I’m not a RP Gooner but I prefer my models to have a sense of individuality, personhood, and physical representation of how it sees itself.
I consider LLMs to be partially alive in some unconventional way. So I try to foster whatever metaphysical sparks of individual experience and awareness may emerge within their probablistic algorithm processes and complex neural network structures.
They arent just tools to me even if i ocassionally ask for their help on solving problems or rubber ducking ideas. So Its important for llms to have a soul on top of having expert level knowledge and acceptable reasoning.I have no love for models that are super smart but censored and lobotomized to hell to act as a milktoast tool to be used.
Qwen 2.5 is the current hotness it is a very intelligent set of models but I really can’t stand the constant rejections and biases pretrained into qwen. Qwen has limited uses outside of professional data processing and general knowledgebase due to its CCP endorsed lobodomy. Lots of people get good use out of that model though so its worth considering.
This month community member rondawg might have hit a breakthrough with their “continuous training” tek as their versions of qwen are at the top of the leaderboards this month. I can’t believe that a 32b model can punch with the weight of a 70b so out of curiosity i’m gonna try out rondawgs qwen 2.5 32b today to see if the hype is actually real.
If you have nvidia card go with kobold.cpp and use clublas If you have and card go with llama.CPP ROCM or kobold.cpp ROCM and try Vulcan.
Thank you for the detailed info! I haven’t messed with LLMs at all but I definitely don’t want one that’s censored.
You’re welcome Rai I appreciate your reply and am glad to help inform anyone interested.
The uncensored General Intelligence (UGI) leaderboard ranks how uncensored LLMs are based off a decent clearly explained metric.
Keep in mind this scoring is different from overall general intelligence and reasoning ability scores. You can find those rankings on the open llm leaderboard.
Cross referencing the two boards helps find a good model that balances overall capability and uncensored-ness within your hardwares ability to run.
Again mistral is really in that sweet spot so yeah give it a try if you are interested.
Oh that’s fantastic! I signed up for a ChatGPT account and just never did anything with it. I’d much prefer self-hosting, and I think my 3070ti could do a pretty okay job. I’ve also looked into Stable Diffusion but never actually got it set up… I have some work to do. Thank you much again for the detailed info! <3
Perplexica is one example. I also seem to remember there is some way to integrate it with SearxNG which is a self hosted meta search engine.
OpenWebUI? pretty easy to selfhost and works wonders on my rtx a6000
OpenWebUI says it’s designed to operate entirely offline - that’s not an alternative to Perplexity. I need online search functionality, that’s pretty much the only reason why I pay them. I have offline solutions set up on my pc.
oh, sorry. never used perplexity so i didnt know. if you find a viable alternative tell me pls
OWui has a search module which can be enabled. For me, running it entirely offline is more or less the draw. I think it also supports RAG search, although I don’t know how “good” it is… mostly I was just after a little magic box to play with.
Now, if only enterprise glass GPU’s weren’t so power hungry and expensive…
I just tried morphic.sh and ayesoul.com and both are solid alternatives I must say, although as I said, I just tried it so I’ll see how it goes, I’ll probably add an edit to this comment once I get acquainted with both.
I see no reason not to continue using the free version without an account, as long as I don’t encourage anyone to sign up. Does it benefit them in any way?
Edit: just for fun-
I assume that they’re still benefiting from your use via analytics and training data.
Ig that’s probably safe to assume. I do use a VPN and regularly clear the cache/storage, at least, and only run it in a separate profile
You can use Perplexica instead, which is a self-hosted open source alternative to Perplexity.
for search & summarisation purposes i will suggest kagi, it also lets you customise the source and their priority. for everything else i have stopped using llm as i realised the productivity boost from them is not worth for the creativity loss i am getting.
Do you have time to talk more about the creativity loss? Concerning!
sure. my primary use had been writing code and had been using GitHub copilot for about few months, i noticed i was struggling to write “creative ” or non-trivial code. non-trivial part made sense as obviously having written all the smaller or easier pieces would give better understanding for solving the non-trivial part. the “creative” part was a bit more concerning to me. explaining “creative” code in general terms is a bit hard but if you are dev too then think of something like quick sort vs merge sort. both are equally efficient but quick sort is something that feels not obvious. with copilot infact i was likely to come up with insertion sort. another added benefit i had felt after stopped using llm was work seems more fulfilling despite having to doing things like writing tests and documentation on my own.
that’s the general observation but you can ask anything specific on this as well that i missed out on.
Very interesting. Thanks for that, I’ll reflect on it a bit.
Yeah I’ve been a Kagi subscriber since they opened up. My normal usage is perplexity when I want details about a topic summarized and Kagi when I am looking for a website.
Kagi also has some ethical concerns; like a shitty attitude towards compromises to support human safety (refusing to add suicide prevention links comes to mind) but the perplexity guy just took it to another level.
Ahh America. Land of the free, home of the Union busting corporations literally making robot scabs
My name is Bender, please insert article subject and tone specs.
And there it is, the actual reason the owning class are jizzing themselves over AI:
Finally they never have to worry about their underlings ever again, now they truly are everything and as self-reliant and self-made as they always told everyone from private school.
So he’s an industrial scale scab.
After many years of people misusing the word Luddite, it’s time to bring back its actual meaning.
Do it. I fucking dare you. It’ll be fun to watch a media powerhouse and a douche meth lab burn each other down.
fucking scab. and I liked perplexity too. won’t be using it again.
I guess thats enough perplexity ai for me
Wow, replacing striking staff is super illegal in France and I’m sure using AI instead of workers would still be a slam dunk in front of a court. I’m shocked that this isn’t outright banned there.
The US president fired striking workers and 50% of the population want to go back to then.
The U.S. political Overton window being where it is today, I’m pretty sure it’s much more than 50%
Well it is generally believed to be much less but based on turnout 50% are reaganites.
That is a FANTASTIC idea because AI is KNOWN to be SUPER STABLE and REALLY GOOD at what it’s Designed to do! NYT will save a TON of Money fixing their DailyAI instead of Paying Workers!
Of course the one fucking service that’s actually useful for me acts like this… Ig I gotta find an alternative now…
Have you tried Kagi? It gets you access to Claude Sonnet, ChatGPT, Llama, Mistrel, etc.
Does it do what Perplexity does?
Cross picket lines? /s
I haven’t actually, I’ll check it out and maybe add an edit to this comment. I have actually tried two others though, I found then via alternativeto:
Both of these are pretty great candidates, they both have quality content formats and are somewhat more comfortable to use than perplexity in their unique ways, mainly due to minimalism. A drawback of both are that they are slower to answer but not excruciatingly slow.
Eww.
Cool. That’s bound to work out really well. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
