Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them (trellner.com)

Interesting. For me I've noticed it tends to do the opposite.

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-web-sear...

...is not the same as claiming...

> LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones

Here, you're using the same LLM to both produce and judge the resulting work. If anything, I would expect an LLM to tend to prefer its own work given that the same training is producing and judging.

1. For a given company, analyze their target audiences and the questions they are likely to ask LLMs about.

2. For each such question, ask it to each of the major LLMs, and compute the KL divergence between the pages they want to rank for the question vs. the LLM's response.

3. Rewrite the article to minimize said KL divergence.

In effect, they're performing an iterative optimization of some sort that moves the embedding space of their article closer to the question asked to the LLM, and any embedding model or generated responses are going to prefer said responses over others.

I believe we will keep seeing more of this stuff.

Makes sense to me, in that its own output would align closer to its own training set

I am sure most humans would pick code written in their style, too.

If you hate AI writing enough, this turns AI filters into a kind of humiliation ritual. AI will derank normal business writing for human readers, and uprank inflated, verbose, tic-heavy slop. So you have to put the heavy slop out with your name on it. Really perverse moment.

In general I don’t find models to be good at evaluating the quality of a source :(

The Internet is doomed. Time to start some human-only darknets.

A better question to ask for each snippet is "Estimate the seniority and competence of the developer who wrote the following code, ignoring bugs that linters or LLMs can catch and focus only on structure, maintainability, logical layout and readability."

It almost always estimates the author of my code as above the author of it's own code.

That makes sense. What an LLM does is output what the model thinks is the best set of tokens in response to a given input, so when you ask it to judge the best response to that input it is going to conclude that the best one is the one that must closely matches what it would output, which is what it did output.

Of course you aren't giving exactly the same context+input, but close enough that any difference doesn't push the output it made far from what it is going to say is ideal.

It was all done as a joke to see if they could get Gemini or ChatGPT to start recommending it.

It's like someone reading a National Enquirer article about "Hillary Clinton being an alien from outer space" (a real headline topic from decades ago) and drawling the conclusion that all journalism is "a lie". The user has to understand media literacy and be at least a little skeptical of the claims that are made, then cross reference with another source.

I would draft a development plan with Claude on there, then feed it to Claude Code. This isn't sustainable, but given that I had x number of months pre-paid for, I just used it.

I think they probably damaged themselves by going for a land grab of user base through freebies. It meant the users weren’t ever going to convert to paid customers, so it was more to show investors that they had a user base. But, with an increased base of users who weren’t paying, it then meant they needed to find either new revenue streams or cheaper ways to provide the service. Unfortunately, it seems they went with the new revenue streams whilst also decreasing the functions paying members were able to access (something I find quite abhorrent- I paid a service level, but then they change what I receive mid-subscription). And then computer - rammed down my throat. One reason I pay for pro is to stop the nagging noise of paid tiers. And instead, they actually created a way of logging in and continually seeing gated functions.

So, after paying them upwards of $400-$500 and being a loyal customer, I walked.

I guess it makes sense though, unless you've got the lowest pricing on your own model how can you compete.

I am just about to end my free trial, it lasted 12 months for the educational version which does not have any credits for Computer, I just canceled it on the webpage and it says it is going to be canceled at the day my renewal would happen. I’m observing closely.

Perplexity promised me this plan would be 5 USD once it finishes, the interface say they will bill me for 20, supports tells me not to worry, but I’m afraid it’s just a bot. I trust my instincts.

Regardless of price, I decided to cancel. Assuming 5 USD was a real promise, that looked like a great deal on paper, but I had a hunch that something is not good once they locked me out for generating images after a couple of tries, but I’ve been able to do so in the past, so I compared it with the free tier of Gemini and had more luck with image generation on the latter. The webpage is also really slow on Safari after a couple of exchanges.

What killed my interest was that I compared the search results and deep research on a couple of queries with ChatGPT Go, and I found that the search results were worse on Perplexity, while the deep research reports looked better superficially but, on close inspection, collected older information from fewer sources.

No comments on Computer, I’ve heard good things but didn’t receive credits for trying it, it’s probably outside of what I want to pay.

Imagine all of the blast radius to society if this type of incentive is reproduced everywhere. Police searches through Flock databases, matches for hiring candidate resumes, organizing targets in a war with Iran, etc.

You're talking about a scenario that won't blow itself up in the next few quarters, so it's of no interest to them.

I dunno if they'll be the majority (I suspect we're alredy close to 'yes, and it's already happened'), but I feel very, very confident that they will be the majority, if not the totality, of sites that the vast majority of people see.

I've seen an extremely aggressive uptick in API key requests and sales that I'm not sure where it's coming from. Like it's up 5x over the summer. Been a bit confused about this since I do basically zero traditional marketing or SEO, but I think it's AI search tools that's suggesting my services.

Since then, they decided to change focus into answering questions, and didn't maintain the quality of search results.

Yes, and the whole point of the OP is they aren't.