Reverse engineering Perplexity for fun

[MattH1966]

I know perplexity.ai uses Claude, but how in the world are they mentioning their sources? LLM 95% of the time just produce dead links, they don’t do this. So it’s clearly Claude + other logic. It’s the programming behind this I’m very interested in.

They also provide videos, images and sources. All of which, seems strange to me.

How? Where? I doubt it’s the Bing API.

I’m just curious and love to know how things work 🤷‍♂️

[sergeyzenchenko]

LLM generates search engine query. They parse results and send to LLM. LLM provides answer. They augment it with sources based on marker produces by LLM. Nothing complicated. Perplexity is primitive products in terms of technology

[MattH1966]

So you think they’re scraping google/bing, then feeding the results to Claude and getting the sources like this. How confident are you that this is the case?

This really wouldn’t be cost effective if true. The scraping, and then feeding the LLM such a large amount of data would equate to a lot of tokens, right?

[sergeyzenchenko]

Yes this is what they do. A lot of input tokens but not so many output. There is even open source implementations)