Somehow it missed the massive forest fire this summer that destroyed much of the park and the town … until it was reminded.
Remind me why anybody takes this tech seriously?
How often does Perplexity update its training info? Looks like the fire was in July.
Although that does show how ineffective an LLM is as a search tool for anything needing recent information.
Perplexity is a front-end to several Grand Theft Autocorrect engines and it primes itself with searches as well, it seems, to the point of linking what it says to search results, but it seems also to have VERY narrow blinders in its processing so that you can ask for something that is flatly impossible and it will not notice it.
I asked for a holiday in Jasper. And it seems to have laser-focused on just that without any general information on Jasper so it missed information it potentially had at hand to build me a (decent, even!) suggested holiday. And the evidence that it has the information potentially at hand is just mentioning the Jasper fire suddenly changes its tune correctly.
Well I can’t say I’m shocked.
I am usually also sceptical about AI but I think it could be a useful technology (LLMs). However, it seems to me that currently we have the technology but did not find the best use cases for it. So we throw it like cooked pasta against the wall in the hopes that something sticks at the wall.
I think it’s more like TEH BLOKKCHAYNE. It has no viable use cases so grifters are throwing it against the wall in the hope that somewhere, someone will pick it up and give them the money they need to escape the inevitable collapse that is coming.
