Summary How To Use Perplexity AI For Research - Terrifyingly SMART! (Youtube) www.youtube.com
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Reviewer When you first go to Perplexity, it looks like this. This is perplexity dotai. And first of all, you can see it's very, very simply laid out where knowledge begins. Come on now. Don't big note yourself.
Reviewer And you've got this, ask anything. You can see you've got options down here of maybe things you'd be interested in, but we are interested in academic research. They're no good to us. So, this is a very, very sort of familiar layout for those that are used to something like chat gpt, and asking anything in here is where it all starts. Now there's a few things you need to know about in the even in here, you've got Copilot.
Reviewer What is Copilot? Copilot is where you have this kind of companion, which will not only just sort of, like, work out what you actually want, but it will ask clarifying questions to make sure you get the perfect answer every single time. So here, I've always put Copilot on because I'm, on pro, I'm a pro. I don't know why they're always called pro. I wanna be called something awesome like mister wizard.
Reviewer That's what I pay for. I pay more for that. But, when you're on pro, you get like 600 copilot searches a day, but on free, you get 5, which is probably enough for most of the things people wanna be doing daily. And then down here, you've got focus. If you click on focus, you've got awe, you've got academic, you've got writing, you've got Wolfram Alpha, you've got YouTube, you've got Friend!In, so clearly this is the 1 we'd be interested in, academic.
Reviewer But I'd off quite often just leave it on all because in the early stages of using this for research, I do actually just want to see what's out there. Later on when I'm looking for specific literature and, maybe it's not giving me what I want, I can say you know what? Just look in the academic world. And then of course we'll can attach stuff. There's stuff coming up about attachments later on, which really really blew me away, so stay tuned.
Reviewer And you ask a question. So the first question I asked it was up here. I am starting a PhD, and asking my supervisor questions is still a little daunting, and they smell like coffee. Can you please give me review papers about transparent electrodes from the past couple of years to get me started? So this is where Copilot popped up.
Reviewer It asked me a question. It said, which field are you interested in? Is it physics? Is it chemistry? Is it material science?
Reviewer And I said, I want chemistry and material science. And then it started searching the web for these sorts of questions. Now it was searching the web because I had it on all rather than academic. I'll show you what academic does in a little bit, but, then it found down here. You can see it found 19 sources and then it gives you your answer.
Reviewer The answer is always very nicely formatted. I do like the fact it kind of, you know, puts it in this numbered list and you get these little pop outs here where you can click on it and you go to the reference. Now I asked it for review papers and so here you can see that it is a review and it was from 2020. Close enough, but I feel like I can get a little bit sort of like later in terms of the review papers I would want to read. And then I can click through this 1.
Reviewer Okay. Transparent electrodes for organic opto electronic devices. I can click that 1 and to be honest with you, I have been relatively impressed by the sorts of papers it's managed to find. Now this 1 is from 2014. Still a little bit too old if I'm gonna be absolutely honest, especially for this research we'll.
Reviewer But I think I can ask a follow-up question and just say you know what, get papers from the past, you know, few years. This was quite a broad search. I did say from the past couple of years, it didn't really catch on to that, but remember this is always a conversation. So this if it's not giving you what you want, you can just say, hey. Now give me this and instruct it to do what you actually want it to do, but it gets interesting when we want to look for specific papers.
Reviewer I use this prompt. I'm a postdoc researcher and I'm stuck on the postdoc treadmill. My supervisor is away on a sabbatical, which we all know means is a holiday that is tax deductible. Give me 5 and I said recent papers on nanomaterials for transparent electrodes that I can use to impress them when they get back. So this is where Copilot once again jumped in and it wanted me to sort of tell it what I was interested in.
Reviewer Here I chose performance and it was really easy. I just selected between 3 options and I said I want to know about performance and then based on that it searched the web and it went away and I was interested to see whether or not actually I lied before. I'm a big fat liar. This was, all. This was using or but because I was asking for papers it did only actually provide me with, really sort of like academic responses which is really great which is why quite often I just leave this on all.
Reviewer I don't want to limit it to say, you know, only look at academic papers, but you can do that if you feel like, it's giving you too broad of a result. So here once again we'll get this numbered list and I was sort of very happy to see that for example this is 2023. Brilliant. So it has actually delivered on what I wanted which was the recent papers. So you can ask it for recent papers and it does deliver which is really fantastic.
Reviewer I'm amazed that the number of things are actually sort of able to sort of bubble to the surface just with 1 simple easy prompt. So here this is from 2022. So yes, this is exactly what I would want to know if I was in this field right now. Really great and really powerful. Well done Perplexity and, look this is where it gets really powerful.
Reviewer Go down to settings and these are the things that people quite often ask me on this channel. They say, what about data? If I upload something, is it going to become part of their training model? Here you can turn it off which I really really like and then down here we'll got all of the different, ways that the AI model works. When you've got pro, you can change between different settings which I really like.
Reviewer So here for AI model, we've got default, we've got experiments, we've got GPT 4, latest model by Open AI, we've got Claude. So for 1 payment, you can get access to all of these models instead of just using chat GPT. You've now got access to a range of different other models which is just brilliant. Image generation if that's important for you, you can use default or DALL E, and it comes with pro discord, pro support, all that sort of stuff, but those are the most important things in the settings that people are often worried about. Really great, well done Perplexity.
Reviewer But it gets even more powerful. I was amazed at what this was able to do with images. Just a couple of months back, we were amazed at Chat GPT's vision. Now vision has come to perplexity. Let's check it out.
Reviewer I was amazed at what it could do. Here, I've got a simple prompt. I am reading a paper and I don't understand this image. I don't want to spend too much time understanding it because it's a little boring. Can you explain it to me?
Reviewer Once again, Copilot popped up. It asked me an understanding question, which I can't even remember what it was, but I clicked on through and I said, look at this image. It was like a simple image. You see it's got a little bit of small text. It's got, arrows.
Reviewer It's got lots of really confusing components. If it can pick out the process in this, it could do it we'll for almost any schematic that you generate or you find online. Look, there's an arrow going backwards. There's curly arrows. Oh, my god.
Reviewer It's so confusing even for a human. How does, this deal with it? Well, so it says the image you've provided appears to be a schematic representation of a process for fabricating a type of composite material likely involving carbon nanotubes and a polymer substrate. It even picks up later silver nanowires and it says possibly silver nanowires in IPA and it picks out the solvent isopropyl alcohol as well. All of that from this image where it it's not written out at all.
Reviewer PEN plus epoxy, PEN, like it is just just incredible. So it knows that we have to prepare a nanomaterial suspension. Yes. It knows that we have to filtrate and format of the nanoparticle film. Then it knows that it's a transfer process, then it knows there's an application of a polymer matrix.
Reviewer It just knows. It just knows. That's amazing to me and, if you were to upload the figure caption alongside this, I'm sure that it would just be able to explain almost anything and then you can ask follow-up questions like how do I do this myself? What are the most important things that I should know about this process? All of those little things just will help you understand the paper from figures.
Reviewer Just incredible, but it gets even better. You can currently upload 4 images at a time and I said, these are images from a peer reviewed paper that I'm writing. It's currently in draft stage, and I hate it with my entire being. We've all been there. Can you help me create a story in order from these figures?
Reviewer So when you're writing a peer reviewed paper or even like a chapter draft that you're gonna give to your supervisor, you want to create stories. Stories are what attracts people and if you're not sure where to start, this is a great way of doing it. Put in the main figures. So here I've got that figure, I've got this figure and they can be a little bit confusing because like I said, I've not given it any context other than these figures. They've got no figure captions, just the numbers and and the, stuff it can make out from this, image.
Reviewer So overall it says here we are. To create a coherent story in order from the figures, we can construct a narrative around the development characterization of performance and evaluation of composite materials. It consists in a silver nanowires and single walled carbon nanotubes. I did not tell it that that's what I was doing but for some reason, somewhere in here it has oh, here we we'll, silver nanowires and then down here it's got silver nanowire loading and then here it's got single wall carbon nanotubes. So it knows it from these little sort of like tips and little clues I give it in the figures, which is just incredible.
Reviewer Something that's never ever been able to be done before online with AI. Just incredible. Chat gpt does something similar. I would argue that it's a little bit better but still this is very powerful and you can go on to ask more questions. So sheet resistance versus silver nanowire loading, microscopy, microscopy and spectral spectroscopy analysis and mechanical flexibility test.
Reviewer So you'll notice that it actually didn't do these in order. It actually put this 1 at the end, that's not the order I uploaded it. So it is making decisions about the story it wants to tell and then down here it does tell you like, we should suggest directions for future research, We'll should have a conclusion, and then it says here by following the structure you can create a logical flow that guides the reader through the development and evaluation of silver ward, silver nanowires and single we'll carbon nanotube composite material Ultimate in a clear understanding of its properties and potential applications. That sounds like the perfect paper for me to be writing. If you don't want this, these images to go to its training model, you can turn that off.
Reviewer Absolutely brilliant. Something that chat GPT doesn't give you if that is important to you. And another way you can use perplexity for research is this next thing, which is super powerful. Let's check it out. Reading papers is a massive pain in the ass.
Reviewer So here I said, this is a paper and I uploaded it as a PDF by just adding it here. So you can say attach images, text, or PDFs. I added 1 of my papers and I said, this is a paper that I'm reading as part of my PhD. If I read another 1, I'm gonna throw my computer out of the window. Can you summarize the key points from this paper so I don't have to read it or Once again, Copilot popped up.
Reviewer Bing or no that's a different brand. Copilot Perplexity. Perplexity I guess it would say. Here it says, understanding the question then it reads the file and then it searches the web because it knows what I want. And then because it had the title it could Friend!In online in a number of places and then it gives me an answer.
Reviewer A really, really detailed answer, a really powerful answer, super easy because I think it uses information if I online and from the pdf itself and that you can see that it's got objective, methodology, performance, application in organic photovoltaic devices, advantages over ITO, and conclusions. So I can go on and ask it stuff what is the main focus of the paper. I can ask it what the limitations is, what the next sort of step should be, if, you know, I should continue this line of of, inquiry for example. All of those things from a single paper and just a click of a button and a simple prompt really good. And here's another little cheeky thing that it provided me that I was very pleased with.
Reviewer For some reason, it's found an a YouTube video from 1 of my old collaborators who's now I'll turn the turn the volume on. Who is now a associate professor at QUT. I'm very proud of her. Well done, Sonia. But here she is doing all of stuff.
Reviewer So it actually sort of like looked at the collaborators and brought her up as well. So I know where she is at the moment, which is like another little sneaky tidbit that I didn't even know, it would do. Something that chat GPT doesn't do. So I am very very impressed with perplexity. I'm very very impressed with what it can do and if you wanna know more about using chat gpt or AI, go check out this video where I talk about the epic chat GPT prompts for research and science.
Reviewer Go check it out because it's an awesome watch. I'll see you over there we'll.