Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to revolutionize how we search for information online.
Microsoft's investment in OpenAI's ChatGPT will see it integrate the technology into its search engine Bing, and Google will compete with its own Bard-flavored search machinery.
That's not all. Amazon has revealed its own language model that it claims is better than GPT 3.5 on synthetic benchmarks. China's Baidu is working on an "Ernie bot", and Alibaba is preparing a rival.
While the tech giants battle over the lucrative search market, other smaller alternatives look to grab a slice of the pie. One of those is Neeva AI.
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What is Neeva AI?
Co-founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan started Neeva as an alternative engine to Google Search in 2019.
Both served in Google before Neeva. Ramaswamy was senior vice president of ads, while Raghunathan served as vice president of monetization at YouTube.
Neeva launched in 2021 as an ad-free and privacy-focused search engine. That philosophy extends to Neeva AI, billed as an "authentic, real-time AI".
Like the competition, it uses Large Language Models (LLM) and search stacks to analyse prompts and display data. It has a big focus on accuracy and source citations for its results.
What can Neeva AI do? How is it different from the competition?
The big selling point for the Neeva search engine is that it uses a subscription-based model and doesn't rely on advertising for revenue.
The free experience provides a limited number of searches and a cap on the number of devices per account.
It also differentiates itself in the way it answers your queries. When Neeva analyzes your prompts, it looks for sources to support its results.
These are shown as citations under every result, similar to how Microsoft's new Bing experience will be.
Unlike ChatGPT, Neeva will not provide an answer if it cannot find enough sources or pages to generate one. This is great because ChatGPT will often show inaccurate results if it can't find enough sources based on your prompt.
Repeat requests or prompts are quickly answered since Neeva stores a cache of previous responses.
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What are the limitations of Neeva AI?
While it's good that Neeva will only display answers to questions it can find sources for, this severely limits its scope.
If Neeva can't get you an answer, it will default to showing a list of websites on a page that is common on search engines.
While it still qualifies as a generative AI, its scope is limited. It cannot do any of the fancy stuff like writing lyrics or speeches. It works only with question queries.
Neeva does everything it can to provide accurate results, like citations or refusing to answer questions it cannot find enough information for online.
Despite this, it's still vulnerable to inaccurate responses or mixing up sources on similarly named queries.
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