I remember asking perplexity about the instructions for upgrading an open source app from several versions back to the latest release. I had hoped that it would search the relevant github, stack, overflow, and blogs. Instead, it hallucinated some instructions from its training corpus, which was incomplete and outdated. When I pushed back, “no, I want you to search for and read the latest instructions” it told me it couldn’t search for newer data and what it had already given me was as recent as it could provide.

If their tool can’t follow open source README files, why would I trust it with other research?