I had an experience that I feel encapsulates the tradeoff between a few different products that each claim to replace part of the “general search experience”.
I asked the following question:
How can I find a list of every PDF I uploaded to Heptabase ?
(Ignore the content of the question for now)
GPT-4
I’m sorry for any misunderstanding, but as of my last programming date (February 4, 2024), there’s no available information on a platform or software named “Heptabase”. It might be possible that you’re confused with the name, or it is a new software that was developed after my latest update, thus I can’t provide instructions on finding every PDF you’ve uploaded to it. Typically in such document management system, you’d either use the search function (if available, use filters for file type to narrow down to PDFs), or traverse through the user interface to find a documented list of all uploaded files. You might also need to consult the specific user guide or help resources provided by the service.
A very reasonable response (but useless in this cotext)
Bard
Bard performed completely (insert expletive) here. First, it took several seconds to mull over. Then, it showed this … this … bizarre response-that-is-really-an-error.
(It asked me to connect Google workspace … why?!)
Perplexity
Perplexity gave me the response in the screenshot below. This was both quick and useful – I tried it out and it worked.
So yeah, I’m shifting most of my daily cognitive load to Perplexity now, with the balance handled by chatGPT.
P.S. Yes, this is dated already, Bard is now Gemini, which is likely better at this (though not as good at other things, but my perception of their relative utility is still the same)