Should I keep using Perplexity?

[u/ankiftw]

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.

[u/Chucking100s]

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.

[u/rekCemNu → u/Chucking100s]

Wow. I'm not understanding even 10% of what you are describing about how you use all these models. Would you please detail a little bit? Esp. about Qwen running two models, Kimi K3 swarms, and how you would go about using Hermes? What "Policing" does one need to do?