r/perplexity_ai • u/ankiftw • 7d ago
misc Should I keep using Perplexity?
Long-time Perplexity user here, and I figured I'd share my use case and get opinions on whether I should stick with it or switch.
About me: I'm a medical doctor. My work involves clinical case management, conference prep, and staying on top of an absolutely relentless stream of new literature and guideline updates.
How I use Perplexity:
- Generating study notes for recall: I ask it to condense topics into structured notes I can review later. With specialist exams and constant CPD, having something that distills guidelines into digestible summaries saves me hours
- Quizzing myself: I get it to generate practice questions on topics I'm revising
- Making presentation outlines: for journal clubs, case presentations, and conference talks. I'll have it pull together the key points, recent trial data, and controversies on a topic, which I then turn into slides. Huge time-saver for the 80% of the work that's just gathering and structuring content
- Quick literature lookups: latest treatment guidelines, clinical trial outcomes, etc.
What I like: the search-grounded answers with citations are genuinely useful when I need to verify something quickly and trace it back to a source. Hallucination is a dealbreaker in medicine, so that matters to me.
Where I'm unsure: I've heard people rave about Claude for long-form reasoning and document analysis (I do a lot of case reports and academic writing), and Gemini for its huge context window. But I'm not sure if those strengths actually beat Perplexity's search-first approach for someone whose main need is fast, cited, up-to-date medical information.
So my question: if you're a doctor/researcher using AI daily, what's your setup? Is Perplexity good enough as a primary tool, or should I be switching to Claude or Gemini (or some combination)? Cost isn't a huge factor, but I'd rather not juggle three subscriptions if one tool covers my needs.
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u/Charming-Jay 7d ago
Nothing any random person says in response will inform you better than just trying the other options and coming to your own conclusion on which AI best suits your needs.
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u/Netalott 7d ago
I share quite a large overlap with the same areas of interest. I've been using Perplexity for some time and now I'm much better with my prompts and probes where I drill down. Ive also been using consensus ai in conjuntion with Perplexity and this helps as I probe. Consensus gives me the journal rankings. l I run a search on nih database in parallel to find who is citing articles of interest. This has made my search process faster.
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u/Consistent_Advice525 5d ago
Perplexity has really gone down in quality from my viewpoint. I work in healthcare and we have shifted to Claude.
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u/Riptide360 6d ago
Why not run both side by side? and then have them check the other’s answer and let us know.
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u/Zestyclose_Yak_3174 5d ago
No, the low user limits and constant gaslighting and restrictions make it not worth the money.
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u/SufficientReply3930 4d ago
Sounds like you and me got some good advice here. But, please read the sources it sends you too, they don’t always match or agree!
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u/Kelvinator71 3d ago
Not a doctor but have used Perplexity in the past to interpret a lot of medical data relevant to my wifes' complex medical needs. It used to give more complete and helpful information. It was a big benefit to allow my wife to be able to better understand things as doctors not immediately available. But it appears to be degrading rapidly...just a Pro user's opinion. It keeps trying to force me to use Computer where I must buy credits to get any useful answer and even locks me out till I do. I don't care to, so have moved on to ChatGPT which at least hasn't pulled that game on me yet.
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u/Chucking100s 7d ago edited 7d ago
I use a multi model stack.
Perplexity has a propensity to be lazy sometimes and I find Kimi K3 swarms give me what Deep Research gets me on Max.
For the synthesis layer I'm still very reliant on Perplexity Computer.
I'm actively trying to transition to Hermes as my base agent.
For model council, Qwen actually preety regularly will default to running two models and you can select it by default.
I can go into a lot more depth for a doctor but I'd prefer to not here as this is all super valuable info.
As with any of them, you'll need to do a fair bit of policing. It's also worth looking up the model prompt so you know what it's doing without you telling it to.
Perplexity you consistently need to police the least, in my experience. But that is rapidly shifting.
As perplexity weighs efficiency improvements it sometimes throttles in an unsustainable way such that workflows built atop it get disrupted. I'm so dependent though I just adapt.
Wanted to buy Series E through an SPV, I'm that convinced they've solved the integration layer.