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Perplexity: How to use it & 5 things to know that will change how you work

Microsoft and Apple leave OpenAI Board, Claude releases fine-tuning, Feds expose Russian AI campaign, 5 things to know about Perplexity and more!

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Everyday AI
July 10, 2024

Outsmart The Future

Today in Everyday AI
8 minute read

🎙 Daily Podcast Episode: Perplexity can be a great way to grow your business, IF you know how to use it properly. Here’s 5 things you need to know about it. Give it a listen.

🕵️‍♂️ Fresh Finds: OpenAI to study AI and biological threats, Vimeo adds AI content labels, Anthropic announces fine-tuning for Claude 3 Haike and the Washington Post launches its own chatbot. Read on for Fresh Finds.

🗞 Byte Sized Daily AI News: Feds expose Russian AI campaign, Microsoft and Apple leave OpenAI’s Board and AMD’s $665 million acquisition. For that and more, read on for Byte Sized News.

🚀 AI In 5: We’re showing you 5 new AI features in Microsoft Copilot! See it here

🧠 Learn & Leveraging AI: If you want to take full advantage of Perplexity’s capabilities, just follow these 5 things. Keep reading for that!

↩️ Don’t miss out: Did you miss our last newsletter? We talked about The Times caught using OpenAI, two new AI video models, the biggest LLM mistake you're making and more! Check it here!

Perplexity - How to use it & 5 things to know that will change how you work ✋

Wanna know a lil secret?

Perplexity's a cheat code for growing your biz.

Chances are, though, you've got a few things wrong about this AI powerhouse and you're not using it to the fullest.

We dish the real 101 on Perplexity and the 5 things you need to know about it.

Join the conversation and ask Jordan questions on Perplexity here.

Also on the pod today:

• Free vs Paid Perplexity 🤔
• Use Cases of Perplexity 🧠
• Future Implications of Perplexity 💭

It’ll be worth your 57 minutes:

Listen on our site:

Click to listen

Subscribe and listen on your favorite podcast platform

Listen on:

Here’s our favorite AI finds from across the web:

New AI Tool Spotlight – Pieces Copilot gives you an on-device AI assistant, Audioscribe turns voice into structured notes and Kilpy is an AI-powered CRM.

OpenAI – OpenAi is partnering with Los Alamos National Laboratory to study how AI can be used against biological threats. 

AI Models — Anthropic dropped some unexpected news, as it announced that its Claude 3 Haiku can now be fine-tuned. Devs about to go wild.

Trending in AI – Vimeo is joining YouTube and TikTok by also adding AI content labels to its platform.

Big Tech - Amazon has hit its cloud training goal early and has already trained 31 million people.

Pop Culture – The Washington Post has debuted a new AI chatbot for climate change questions.

Read This – The speech generator in Microsoft’s VALL-E 2 is so good, that scientists say it’s too dangerous to release. We kinda agree, and said that a few months ago about VASA-1.

AI in Politics — A U.S. Rep used AI to clone her voice after Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) took her voice away.

1. Feds Expose Russian AI Disinformation Campaign 🚨

Federal prosecutors bust a massive AI-generated bot farm spreading lies about Putin in the US and abroad, marking a significant crackdown on state-sponsored propaganda. The operation, orchestrated by Russia's Federal Security Service, involved nearly 1000 fake social media accounts created using advanced AI technology.

Experts hail this move as a crucial step in combating AI-powered misinformation, with FBI Director Christopher Wray emphasizing the intention to undermine Ukraine and influence geopolitical narratives in favor of the Russian government.

2. Microsoft and Apple Leave OpenAI Board Amid Antitrust Concerns 👀

Microsoft has voluntarily given up its observer seat on OpenAI's board, raising eyebrows amidst antitrust scrutiny. Apple will also not move forward with joining the board. Microsoft had invested over $10 billion in OpenAI, becoming its exclusive cloud partner and leveraging AI models to boost its products.

With EU and UK regulators probing the partnership, this move hints at deeper complexities in the Big Tech landscape

3. AMD Snags Silo AI for $665 Million, Boosting AI Power 💰

AMD acquires Finland's Silo AI, the largest private AI lab in Europe, for a hefty $665 million, intensifying the rivalry with Nvidia. Silo AI's track record of delivering cutting-edge AI solutions for industry giants like Philips and Rolls-Royce positions AMD for a significant leap in the AI chip supremacy battle.

This acquisition, coupled with AMD's previous purchase of Nod.ai, underscores the company's commitment to staying competitive in the fast-paced world of artificial intelligence technology.

4. Google Gemini AI Coming To Samsung Devices 📱

Google and Samsung are teaming up to bring exciting new features to Samsung devices, introducing Gemini Android app updates and Circle Search functionality alongside the latest Galaxy devices. The collaboration allows for seamless integration between Google services and Samsung's cutting-edge technology, promising a fresh user experience.

With Wear OS 5 enhancements and Galaxy Watch Ultra's debut, this partnership signals a major shift in the wearable tech landscape.

5. Anthropic's Latest Feature Takes Claude to New Heights 🚀

Anthropic's newest feature for Claude 3.5 Sonnet is changing the game for developers by offering prompt engineering techniques to enhance their applications' performance. With quick feedback and a built-in prompt generator, developers can easily fine-tune prompts and improve Claude's responses for specialized tasks.

The Evaluate tab in Anthropic Console provides a testing ground for developers to analyze the effectiveness of their AI application's prompts across various scenarios, saving time and effort for prompt engineering novices and experts alike.

5 New Microsoft Copilot AI Features You Must Try!

Microsoft just updated its Edge browser and with it came some new and free Copilot features!

We’re showing you 5 new AI features in Copilot and giving you use cases examples.

#4 is prolly our fave.

🦾How You Can Leverage:

Do you actually enjoy using the Internet nowadays?

TBH, we kinda hate it. 

Like we chatted about today, the rise of Internet-connected large langauge models like ChatGPT and Perplexity leads to an ugly downside — the internet starts stinking.

  • There’s more ads.

  • More noise.

  • And the rabbit hole searches of trying to find ONE simple piece of information are resulting in even more browser tabs open across ours screens

  • (Wait, what was I searching for again?)

Enter: Perplexity.

We’re biiiiiiiig fans of the Perplexity, the answers engine that can use different LLMs under the hood.

Today, we decided to do some live walk throughs and demos. We ran some live Perplexity prompting with our audience (you can go check the results of our work here), went over the free vs. paid plan and more.

Annnnnd, you know we had to leave you with a easy-to-digest list of things you need to know.

So with that?

Here’s the 5 things you need to know about Perplexity. 👇

1 – Perplexity is NOT an LLM

Common misconception here y’all.

Perplexity is not a large language model. Rather, it’s an answers engine. In other words you:

  1. Choose a model:

  1. Shoot a lil query into the search box.

  2. Sit back and watch as Perplexity (literally) browses, reads and summarize like 20 websites to answer you questions:

Try this:
Best part about Perplexity?

The basics are free. Also, you get 5 free “pro” searches every four hours, which is the more powerful version of Perplexity.

If you’re not on the $20/mo plan, you don’t get all of the premium features. But you can also do like Woozy and have 9 different free accounts going at once until your computer goes boom.

2 – Perplexity lets you upload files 🗃️

If you’re looking for answers, you might as well throw your files in there too, right?

(PSA: Never upload proprietary, confidential, sensitive or classified information into LLMs unless the human in charge says it’s gucci.)

Oh, we’re back.

Being able to mix 20ish websites AND your own files at the same time is legit amazing. It’s probably a similar feeling people had when they listened to the radio for the first time.

Like. Whooooooooooa.

Try this:
Perplexity supports PDFs, text files, CSVs and other coding docs. Truth be told, though, Perplexity isn’t winning any awards in its abilities to handle long/big files.

But, if you just need to throw a few short PDFs into your long research mix, it’ll do the job.

(If you need to do some heavy doc lifting, go check out this video to get your AI fill with the free version of Copilot.)

3 – Perplexity is kinda in hot water 🔥

Are you still scratching your head that this is even possible?

So in a few Perplexity prompts, you can skip out on visiting like 100+ websites and just get the good stuff and have it do all your thinking/researching/ad blocking?

(We checked… in our live Perplexity prompting on today’s livestream, we crunched through more than 100+ webpages in a matter of minutes and grabbed only the important goodies.)

Like… what about all those blog post writers, media companies and others that created all the content to begin with?

Perplexity announced it wants to create a revenue-sharing deal with content publishers, but few details have emerged.

But what has emerged……

Try this:

You see how that could lead to some upset people? Some recent reports concluded that Perplexity might have used some deceptive practices to get data from some websites.

Essentially, it’s alleged that Perplexity uses third-party data scrapers to bypass content publishers who are trying to block Perplexity and other LLM makers from grabbing all of their perfectly primed prose.

Rut-roh.

4 – Perplexity is… going social? 🗣️

Is that a social media site?

Many have pointed out a unique feature that Perplexity rolled out earlier this year — its ‘Discover’ section.

It looks kinda like a social media feed. What gives?

Try this:

There’s something more than meets the surface here.

All of those pages we talked about in today’s show that you can make public? Those can end up in the Discover section with very social media-esque vibes.

Which brings us to…..

5 – Perplexity is gonna kill traditional search ☠️

Oh, now #4 makes a lotta sense, right?

Here’s the long story short on how we think Perplexity is using us all to do its dirty work — killing traditional search.

So, you can use Perplexity to (kinda) look at the Top 10 results form a particular topic and combine the best of it all into a Thread. Then, you can publish that Thread as a public page, like this one we did live on today’s show.

Then, those public pages get picked up by Google and (oftentimes) are already taking top rankings on traditional Google search. (Seriously…. go read about it.)

Try this:

Here’s what this could mean — AI search engines like Perplexity are (kinda) ‘borrowing’ from the articles they scrape, helping you rewrite them, and then encouraging you to publish them publicly.

ChatGPT recently released a similar feature.

So, we’ve seen that ChatGPT and other LLMs (Perplexity included) have picked up some major steam recently.

So, as more and more users start to use AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to search, how are those companies hedging their bets?

They’re trying to make sure that whatever you DO search in traditional search engines, that you’ll end up finding AI-published recaps anyways. (Like Perplexity Pages.)

To recap

Perplexity is amazing.

Using an Internet-connected LLM or answers engine like Perplexity will end up saving you hours a week.

So is the takeover inevitable? (Or do you still enjoy having 27 tabs open and STILL searching for the info you need?)

Either the rise of answers engines will crush traditional search and change the way we all consume information online, or we may see so many lawsuits shut the whole thang down.

Either way, we’ll be here. Watching it all. Keeping you updated.

What do you think? Hit us with a reply and lettuce know.

⌚

Numbers to watch

$40 Billion

Meta estimates its spending $35 billion to $40 billion on AI this year and plans to invest even more next year.

Now This …

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