I’d signed up for the service, paying $20 per month. I understand that running this stuff costs money, so sure, I’ll buy a subscription. And some of the Perl programming I was doing, when I asked Perplexity.ai to help, it was excellent.
But recently, the stuff I want, they are putting behind a new tier called “Computer” for $200 per month.
I feel betrayed.
Yes, I would like “Ready-to-paste Picard script for true multi-genre tags – tested on mixed genre tracks”. But I don’t have $200 per month, and never will.
I asked Perplexity.ai if I could turn off the prompting to use “Computer” and of course the answer is no.
It is still useful, of course. What these programs can do, using statistics of word association, is spectacular. But, there’s no Intelligence in Large Language Models (LLMs) yet. If I were going to whine about work, I’d tell how MS Copilot literally wasted 6 hours of my 8-hour day yesterday. It is amazingly bad at generating PowerShell (and if any company should have PowerShell expertise, it should be Microsoft). After getting past all the syntax errors, the script finally worked, except it searched a mailbox and matched nothing. Turns out Copilot hallucinated a function for matching Sent Items. Gah! I am so ready to be retired from this hell.
Anyway, back to Perplexity.ai – the bait-and-switch of getting me to sign up and then putting the good stuff behind a bigger paywall is… well, it doesn’t feel good, man.
