Visual Revolution: Perplexity AI Integrates Images and Video with Metas Llama 2

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Perplexity AI is in the news for a bunch of really impressive new features and updates they have made to their AI. So today on the podcast, we're going to be diving into what they have launched, what's going on, and how we see this impacting the future of AI.

0:43Perplexity AI is best known for their AI chatbot, but they do a lot more than exclusively that. And they've also released a bunch of new features. So in addition to their array of fresh features and an enhanced mobile app and an updated browser extension, Perplexity's chatbot can also now answer questions using imagery rather than solely relying on words. I think this is incredibly impressive, and I think this is really an incredible display of kind of speed that we're seeing here, because Perplexity also launched a novel chatbot constructed on Meta's just-released Llama 2 AI model, and they achieved this just days after Meta actually made the language model open source.

1:25So I think this really goes to show two things that are happening here. Number one, obviously, Perplexity AI is an awesome startup that is really fast, really nimble, getting things implemented really quick. But also, I think it just shows the ability of and the power of these open source models. So from Meta's perspective, by making this Lama 2 AI model public, they're really allowing AI startups to pivot and to release things incredibly quickly and get things to market very fast. I think the significant standout in Perplexity's upgrade is really the big thing that we're seeing here is really just the novel image search attribute.

2:05I think it really gives Perplexity AI the power to answer questions about people and locations with photographs and videos, which is massive. Images are accessible straight from the search results, while videos present as compact buttons. So they're playable directly within Perplexity's interface. I think it's a pretty interesting trick. I think this saves you a lot of hassle of hopping over to YouTube or other platforms. Image search is already live on Perplexity's website, and the team plans to extend this feature to their mobile apps soon. so perplexity also introduced a functional tweak allowing users to edit the titles of their search threads for improved organization and this adds flexibility um in part to and kind of i really i think this kind of added flexibility is part of the revamped look for perplexity's chrome extension and also their ios app and the mobile app received a significant upgrade essentially this is going to it's going to mirror the web portal features um so you're going to see things like thread syncing language defaults and other performance enhancements and perplexity's site also underwent a big you know overhaul and it now has a new url which is pplx.ai it would appear this whole new url thing is what the cool kids are doing is we're seeing companies like twitter that have now switched their url to x.com so maybe these new shorter urls are a big deal in any case for people that don't know exactly what perplexity ai is if you go to their website perplexity.ai or the the other URL I just mentioned.

3:36Essentially, it's a lot like ChatGPT. I think they're kind of going for more of like a Google Bard thing where it's a little bit more rich. You can ask it for videos and it's going to give you links to a bunch of YouTube videos or other, you know, video stock, stock video websites that will give you that kind of stuff. It answers all your questions and it sources all of its answers based off of the websites and the web pages that I actually pulled the information from, similar to what Google Bard would do. And then below it has related questions that it's kind of like on Google when you do a search and they have like the they have the drop downs of like expounding on a question you've asked or, you know, similar questions.

4:14They have the same thing, which kind of give you a little bit more detail. Now, one thing that I did test out on Perplexity AI after they did this update was right. They mentioned that they're having images embedded. So I actually asked it for an image of turtle eggs because it was going along with a conversation I was having with it more on that later. But it did generate some turtle egg pictures for me. Now, at first, I wasn't sure if these were going to be generated from, if these were actually going to be just like pulled off the internet, like essentially, I'm just getting Google images, or if they're generating them, it would appear that they're generating AI images.

4:46But what's really funny is the response it gave me when I said, show me a photo of turtle eggs, it said, as an AI language model, I cannot display images directly. However, you can find photos of turtle eggs on a bunch of different websites, and it gave me links to a bunch of different websites um and anyways but then right after it did that it did actually generate four images of turtle eggs two of which look super unrealistic one of which looks like a bunch of uh white perfectly circle white balls in a wooden bowl and one of which i think actually looks like turtle eggs in the sand that is kind of realistic it's kind of good so um i think that it i'm not sure exactly what image generation engine they're using on this or if they have their own but regardless it does generate images it does find you videos it found a bunch of youtube videos about turtle eggs and it gave me all sorts of information had a full conversation with me it feels a lot more like bard or kind of a google search vibe than chat gpt but all in all a pretty cool tool it's doing some cool things that i i do like so i will give it that i will say that um they really are kind of hinting at plans for more personalized ai both on the mobile and the web versions of perplexity because they are teasing the possibility of an ai profile creation button so some of perplexity's future visions have already kind of become or started coming to the forefront in perplexity labs which is essentially a digital sandbox for perplexity and its users to trial new concepts um i think the residence of labs is llama chat that's the first ai model they have on there a chat bot which is based off of meta's new llama 2 model we're talking about right they crank this thing out super fast they were able to essentially gain access to the llm and leverage its inference engine to make generative ai chatbot um and to bring this onto their platform in less than 24 hours and they did this without any licensing fee that's absolutely amazing the fact that this thing is open source and free honestly big kudos to meta for um giving this thing away this was a massive uh it i think it garners a lot of goodwill um from meta perplexity ceo is aravind serving us and he shared the excitement in a linkedin post he was he said quote you can now view answers for queries related to people places and things with images and videos rendered in addition to the existing rich formatted text play the video without having to leave perplexity we're excited to announce perplexity labs as a playground for future experiments the first of which is llama chat fully powered by perplexity's llm inference engine so I think it seems like perplexity is really going full steam ahead with more exciting features and the development of their platform is accelerating so I think beyond just kind of the addition of this new multimedia content perplexity AI is also making a lot of they're taking they're making a lot of big steps to kind of further further the personalization of their users interactions they're looking to introduce a bunch of new features and a lot of really exciting stuff.

7:38So perplexity is definitely a company that I will be following in the future and seeing how they continue to help the landscape of AI evolve and progress.