Agents or Bots? Making Sense of AI on the Open Web (opens in new tab)

(perplexity.ai)

4 pointscaleb-allen7mo ago4 comments

4 comments

> It appears Cloudflare confused Perplexity with 3-6M daily requests of unrelated traffic from BrowserBase, a third-party cloud browser service that Perplexity only occasionally uses for highly specialized tasks (less than 45,000 daily requests). Because Cloudflare has conveniently obfuscated their methodology and declined to answer questions helping our teams understand

This doesn't look great, especially when we look at the attention generated by the original post compared with that one!

bazzargh7mo ago

to me it doesn't look great that Perplexity use BrowserBase at all. I asked BB's doc bot if you can customise the user agent; it says you can't because it sets the user agent automatically _in order to bypass bot checks_.

This seems to be the only secret sauce they offer; other than that it's just a headless browser farm. So perplexity saying "companies like Cloudflare mischaracterize user-driven AI assistants as malicious bots" is disingenuous at best; they chose to use a tool designed to mask their traffic and it blew up in their face?

sylware7mo ago

You can have click/troll farms with real humans (going thru VPNs, BOT networks, etc). Even "normal" people who are "paid" (for instance gacha game campaign offering in-game resources for free, that in exchange of a good "review", yes they can link the review with the right account for resource "reward", and it seems it can go down to social networks).

caleb-allenOP7mo ago

Related discussion of the original Cloudflare post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44785636

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