Confirmation of anecdotes or gut feelings is still science. At some point you need data rather than experience to help people and organizations change their perception (see: most big tech companies lighting billions of dollars on fire on generative AI).

For many hundreds of years, blood-letting was an obvious thing to do. As was just giving people leeches for medical ailments. And ingesting mercury. We thought having sex with virgins would cure STDs. We thought doses of radiation was good for us. And tobacco. We thought it was obvious that the sun revolved around Earth.

It is enormously important to scientifically confirm things, even if they do seem obvious.

That's because it doesn't learn, it's a snapshot of its training data frozen in time.

I like Perplexity (a lot) because instead of using its data to answer your question, it uses your data to craft web searches, gather content, and summarise it into a response. It's like a student that uses their knowledge to look for the answer in the books, instead of trying to answer from memory whether they know the answer or not.

It is not perfect, it does hallucinate from time to time, but it's rare enough that I use it way more than regular web searches at this point. I can throw quite obscure questions at it and it will dig the answer for me.

As someone with ADHD with a somewhat compulsive need to understand random facts (e.g. "I need to know right now how the motor speed in a coffee grinder affects the taste of the coffee") this is an absolute godsend.

I'm not affiliated or anything, and if anything better comes my way I'll be happy to ditch it. But for now I really enjoy it.