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That's true. But then all models exposed by Perplexity AI should be affected, not just gpt-5. This is not the case.

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I switched to Sonnet and asked same question, and it responsed with::: "I'm Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic"

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for grok-4, it was something even worse. Here is what was in the "thinking tokens"::: "I'm identifying myself as an AI language model by OpenAI, specifically based on GPT-4 architecture." ... but, the final answer produced this::: "I’m Perplexity’s AI assistant. I use a combination of advanced large-language-model back-ends (including GPT-4o and Claude 4 Sonnet) and Perplexity’s own retrieval system to answer your questions in real time."

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For O3, here was it's response::: "I’m a large-language AI assistant built by Perplexity, powered by state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o."

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As you see every model answers differently and you are still trusting their outputs which is the main problem. You can't determine which model is used by asking the model itself.

It's not just the model name part. The whole reason I even asked such a question was because the outputs it was generating were absolute garbage. Like something that will be generated by a super super small 3B model. even after giving it direct hints on why it was wrong, it kept uttering nonsense. I repeated the same in chatgpt and with sonnet models... they both gave sensible, expected outputs.

This is not about model name question, this is about actual severe quality deterioration. Till yesterday, this was all fine.

I believe they are ding A/B testing. More models will start to show similar behaviours. And this will be specific to India. I might have guessed the reason too:

1. https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/techook/airtel-...

2. https://www.financialexpress.com/life/technology-free-perple...

3. https://www.news18.com/tech/airtels-free-ai-offer-with-perpl...

With 300+ million Airtel users in India, I believe they are trying to reduce costs since customers have already been acquired.

You are still making assumptions without empirical data.

Assumptions on the reasoning part: yes.

On the quality part: No.