I work professionally in software engineering mostly on the management side and have been using AI tools off and on for a couple years, really ramping up the last few months as web search opened up tremendous use cases for Claude and ChatGPT.
I don't rely on them for everything, but as an augment for learning and even some daily life stuff (like recipes and tweaks, shopping lists generated in markdown (that can import into Apple notes in iOS 26!) etc. they've been very beneficial and well worth the cost, even beyond the use cases of helping me understand some deep bowel of Python that I wasn't intimately familiar with.
I also use and like Kagi for search, so I don't need another purely web search engine.
As I understand it, Perplexity does not have their own foundation model. When I look at their interface it seems incredibly cluttered and unintuitive, especially vs. the other leading providers. What exactly are people getting out of it, or is it more like they chose this a while ago because it was the most similar to a search engine and have stuck with it due to familiarity?
TL;DR if there's some benefit to adding Perplexity to my arsenal I will, but after reading up on it I can't discern what exactly it has to offer, and certainly can't understand why there continues to be industry chatter about them being a top contender for acquisition.
I don't rely on them for everything, but as an augment for learning and even some daily life stuff (like recipes and tweaks, shopping lists generated in markdown (that can import into Apple notes in iOS 26!) etc. they've been very beneficial and well worth the cost, even beyond the use cases of helping me understand some deep bowel of Python that I wasn't intimately familiar with.
I also use and like Kagi for search, so I don't need another purely web search engine.
As I understand it, Perplexity does not have their own foundation model. When I look at their interface it seems incredibly cluttered and unintuitive, especially vs. the other leading providers. What exactly are people getting out of it, or is it more like they chose this a while ago because it was the most similar to a search engine and have stuck with it due to familiarity?
TL;DR if there's some benefit to adding Perplexity to my arsenal I will, but after reading up on it I can't discern what exactly it has to offer, and certainly can't understand why there continues to be industry chatter about them being a top contender for acquisition.