A friend kindly informs me that if you’re a customer of O2, a common mobile phone carrier in the UK then as part of their “Priority” rewards program you can get a free year of Perplexity Pro, RRP £150.

It comes in the form of a unique voucher code. So if you’re not an O2er. but have a friend with an O2 account that doesn’t care about such things then you can pester them for their code to use for yourself.

Perplexity is an AI-LLM powered search engine. Primarily like a Google Search except it does the effort of reading the results of your query for you, distilling it into a chatbot like response you can ask about.

It has its own model or, with a pro account you can use those from companies like OpenAI, Claude et al. It’s the same kind of technology so if you have moral objections or accuracy concerns about LLMs in general then the same will apply here. Perplexity have certainly been in trouble for ingesting content that they shouldn’t have.

But one possible advantage it does have over its brethren is at least it is a bit more transparent about citing its sources rather than trying to hoard every last click for itself, in that it provides links to the source material it uses to formulate its answers for you, should you want to check if it’s telling the truth.