And the Winner of U.S. Election Coverage? Perplexity

Few would have predicted that on US election night, Perplexity — the smallest player in the AI field — would emerge as the clear winner in providing the best coverage.

Using real time information garnered from the Associated Press, Perplexity was able to deliver sober, up-to-the-minute reporting, something its competitors either did not even try to do or failed miserably.

For example, Threads and the rest of Meta’s networks simply didn’t bother with election night: in the midst of the overwhelming triumph of its enemy, aware perhaps of what was coming its way, the company decided opted for a very low profile, effectively treating this momentous occasion as just another night. Threads’ “For you” timeline showed erroneous or old information for much of the night, prompting anger among many users.

X’s AI, Grok, was carried away by the euphoria rampant among Elon Musk’s supporters, continuing with the pro-Trump line it had taken throughout the campaign, and called Trump wins in many states before the results were in. Many Democratic Party supporters, among them Taylor Swift fans, are steadily moving to Bluesky, abandoning a network they now see as hostile territory.

Meanwhile, Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT stayed out of the fray, politely refusing requests for information on how the contest was going. ChatGPT alone sent more than two million people to look for results elsewhere (“I’m just an AI, go read the actual news”) and refused more than a quarter of a million times to generate images related to the candidates.

What should an AI algorithm do in the face of events of this type? The reasonable thing would be to acquire information from reliable sources, digesting that information in appropriate formats that allow anyone to get a clear and objective idea of what is happening. In other words, neither the triumphalist hysteria of Grok or the no-show the rest of the algorithms put in. Perplexity has won by a landslide, showing it can deal with a complex situation like a presidential election more than competently, positioning it very well for the next challenge the company is proposing: analyzing current affairs.

Right now, all of us who have the Perplexity app installed on our phones have access to a news roundup each morning, and can access the sources of information and develop the topic with additional questions. The company seems to have readying for this for a long time — it has always provided the best answers, compared to other AI services that limit themselves to saying that current affairs are not included in their training data, and now intends to position itself as a search engine, possibly with advertising.

Who knows if this will work out, but in the meantime it is succeeding in setting itself apart from the competition in a very crowded field. For the moment, then, if you want to know what’s going on in real time, Perplexity seems the best option.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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