Posts for: #Note

胡适的治学方法三讲，讲得也很好，哪怕放到现在，也挺实用的呢。

I think of Perplexity as a knowledge discovery engine, neither a search engine. Of course, we call it an answer engine, but everything matters here. The journey doesn’t end once you get an answer. In my opinion, the journey begins after you get an answer. You see related questions at the bottom, suggested questions to ask. Why? Because maybe the answer was not good enough, or the answer was good enough, but you probably want to dig deeper and ask more.

几个简单的原则造就了维基百科，这是原则之一：

We’re always making sure we can cite what it says, what we write, every sentence. Now, what if we ask the chatbot to do that? Then we realized, that’s literally how Wikipedia works.

In Wikipedia, if you do a random edit, people expect you to actually have a source for that, and not just any random source. They expect you to make sure that the source is notable. There are so many standards for what counts as notable and not. He decided this is worth working on.

The first employee we hired came and asked us about health insurance. Normal need, I didn’t care. I was like, “Why do I need a health insurance? If this company dies, who cares?” My other two co-founders were married, so they had health insurance to their spouses, but this guy was looking for health insurance, and I didn’t even know anything.

Who are the providers? What is co-insurance, a deductible? None of these made any sense to me. You go to Google. Insurance is a category where, a major ad spend category. Even if you ask for something, Google has no incentive to give you clear answers. They want you to click on all these links and read for yourself, because all these insurance providers are bidding to get your attention.

We took this principle and asked ourselves, what is the best way to make chatbots accurate, is force it to only say things that it can find on the internet, and find from multiple sources.

• Aravind Srinivas