1 point

Before this story, I had no opinion on Perplexity.

Now I hope this product dies in a fire.

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180 points

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!’

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63 points

It’s the entire point of AI, to replace the workforce.

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30 points

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.

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13 points

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.

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15 points
*

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.

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6 points

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.

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1 point
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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.

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149 points

Damn. I liked Perplexity. Sucks to delete it, but this guy can fuck directly off.

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49 points
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I’m going to have to try the selfhosted variants now. What a huge piece of shit.

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13 points

Any recommendations?

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17 points

GPT4All and then any model you like. I like mistral.

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9 points

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!

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8 points
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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.

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6 points
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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.

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6 points

OpenWebUI? pretty easy to selfhost and works wonders on my rtx a6000

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0 points

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.

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3 points

You can use Perplexica instead, which is a self-hosted open source alternative to Perplexity.

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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-

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4 points

I assume that they’re still benefiting from your use via analytics and training data.

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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

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0 points

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.

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2 points

Do you have time to talk more about the creativity loss? Concerning!

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3 points

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.

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1 point

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.

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102 points

Ahh America. Land of the free, home of the Union busting corporations literally making robot scabs

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13 points

My name is Bender, please insert article subject and tone specs.

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88 points
*

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.

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