You would go to it, but results showed much more work was needed - also in RAG. Which became a general focus in the community, for the many problem it may solve and the many it could help fixing. Some found better formulas for RAG, others swamped. Perplexity made it a flag, but in a factual large company. And the problem with "fake sources and citations" is still there, while mitigated in the full complex systems - hallucination is still a benchmarked effect in LLM ANNs, and blunders from excessive trust are still recorded.
Literally every cited number was flat out wrong. Some people replied to point out the mistakes but as I recall no one called out the Perplexity elephant in the room specifically.
I'll have to find it again, it was such an absurdly ironic scenario it felt like performance art or something.
In theory maybe, in some tentative hope that the RAG would patch the hallucination problem - but the LLM showed such a low effective equivalent IQ that its usage was always incredibly frustrating. (It could have improved recently - I am not sure. Some tests have indicated it as especially dumb even not long ago.)