About Perplexity: It's fun and rather useful

Perplexity is a free online artificial intelligence-driven search engine. I recently started using it to see what kind of answers it would come up with for various topics, e.g., How are gold and uranium created? and What is the best beef stroganoff recipe?. The answers that came back were pretty good. They can be made more on-point by asking a follow-up question on a part of the platform called Copilot. The answers come with links to the information sources (shown as numbers in little circles) the AI based its answers on, so one can easily fact check Perplexity to see if it is hallucinating or being reasonable.

The What is the best beef stroganoff recipe? question came back with this:


That's not a bad response, but a Copilot follow-up question or two would probably be in order to find a good recipe online that one could copy if one is not familiar with beef stroganoff. Since I cook a lot and have been making beef stroganoff for decades, that general answer would be good enough for me because I almost always alter specific recipes (see image below, I did that one yesterday - converted an interesting meat dish to vegetarian) to suit my own taste. In the case of beef stroganoff, I include sweet paprika, a lot of onion and mushroom in a sour cream sauce. 




By Germaine: Seeker of what is fun and rather useful


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