On Tuesday, two AI startups tried convincing the world their AI chatbots had been adequate to be an correct, real-time supply of knowledge throughout a high-stakes Presidential election: xAI and Perplexity.
Elon Musk’s Grok failed nearly immediately, providing fallacious solutions about races’ outcomes earlier than the polls had even closed.
On the opposite hand, Perplexity provided useful, real-time election insights and maps all through the night time, linking to dependable assets and providing historic context the place applicable.
Perplexity took a dangerous guess, and it paid off.
Late final week, the startup introduced the launch of its election data hub, that includes real-time maps populated with voting knowledge from Democracy Works and the Associated Press, the identical data sources that energy Google’s election map. This strategy was completely different from most different AI chatbots, comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, which merely refused to reply questions associated to the election.
It’s comprehensible why most AI labs sat this election out. It was the secure and accountable selection for a lot of of them, as they’ve been affected by embarrassing hallucinations in some unspecified time in the future or one other within the final yr.
In explicit, OpenAI lately launched its Google competitor, ChatGPT Search. But the Sam Altman-led startup didn’t belief the characteristic to reply questions on this election, directing customers to Vote.org as a substitute. ChatGPT Search continues to be an early product, which is simply too unreliable for folks to make use of in on a regular basis situations, and OpenAI appears to have acknowledged that.
In distinction, Perplexity has been testing its Google competitor out in the true world since December 2022, and clearly felt it had sufficient knowledge to provide this election a shot.
Perplexity’s election night time success may set it again in its ongoing struggle with media firms; particularly, Dow Jones’ current lawsuit claiming the startup competes with media firms for a similar audiences. Despite the various outbound hyperlinks inside the AI chatbot’s solutions, Perplexity’s election hub was itself a vacation spot on election night time, and it didn’t require customers to enterprise off the app to get all their data. It actually looks as if Perplexity was competing with media firms, who had been additionally vying for eyeballs on election night time, despite the fact that Perplexity collects its data from these retailers. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas even claimed “record traffic” the day earlier than, and clearly hoped to take care of that momentum.
While Perplexity had offers with Democracy Works, the AP, and some different media firms to energy election options, the startup additionally indiscriminately used reside election protection from different media retailers comparable to CBS, CNN, and the BBC. Sure, Perplexity provided attribution, however the firm hasn’t introduced any revenue-sharing partnerships with these retailers and it’s unclear if any cash modified palms.
How Perplexity fared on Election Night
First, let’s begin with Perplexity’s election options that had nothing to do with generative AI: the charts.
People sometimes love visible election charts, clicking into them, and seeing granular knowledge on a state-by-state degree. It was a wise transfer for Perplexity to construct these out, and ensured their AI methods weren’t the only supply of knowledge within the app.
When visiting Perplexity’s election hub, customers had been met with a well-known trying electoral map of the United States, with some states blue for Kamala Harris and others purple for Donald Trump. Obviously, Perplexity didn’t reinvent the wheel with this characteristic – copying the show Google and each TV community exhibits – however they didn’t have to. Throughout the night time, this map appeared to replace each minute or so, reflecting the data on the Associated Press’ web site. It was a great way to comply with the election.
There had been bugs in…
