Perplexed There’s a new-ish artificial intelligence-powered search engine on the scene — but in a high-visibility debut, it was caught lacking. In a profile for the New York Times, tech columnist Kevin Roose said that he tried the Perplexity search engine, a year-old ad-free Google alternative built on models from OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, for “several weeks” to see how well it compared to its more established competitors. Although Roose ultimately gave Perplexity a positive review despite its lack of business model, he admitted that he had something of an ulterior motive for wanting to look into it. “I’m also scared that AI search engines could destroy my job, and that the entire digital media industry could collapse as a result of products like [it],” he wrote. “But I’m getting ahead of myself.” When it came to “complicated or open-ended searches,” like finding date night spots or venues within a particular budget, Roose wrote that the AI engine reigned. But for simple factual queries, such as the date for Novak Djokovic’s forthcoming tennis matches, it went ahead and described a match he’d already completed in the past. Spin Doctors One of Perplexity’s biggest draws, in Roose’s mind, is that it allows users to upload files, which the engine then can summarize and/or use to “maintain contextual awareness when responding to follow-up questions,” per the company blog. When Roose asked it to summarize a paper about AI models that he’d uploaded, however, it went ahead and confidently described an entirely different study….AI Search Engine Bungles Facts When Profiled by the New York Times