Perplexity Dove Into Real-Time Election Tracking While Other AI Companies Held Back

Perplexity, an AI search engine that has courted controversy by lifting liberally from news articles and skirting web-scraping rules, this week promised to serve as a reliable source for live information on the tightly contested US presidential election.

Perplexity promised that its Election Information Hub would serve as “an entry point for understanding key issues, voting intelligently, and tracking election results.”

“There is only one AI that can do this,” Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas posted on X. Srinivas appeared to troll the publisher of The New York Times by posting a message on X offering to help while Times Tech Guild workers strike during contract negotiations; he later posted that the offer was for infrastructure rather than AI-generated content.

Perplexity’s tool did not end up making any gaffes last night, providing mostly accurate voting information and also accurately tracking the results as they ...