Perplexity AI Cheating on Model?

Question

See screenshot: https://postimg.cc/YL0d6rvPIt seems to be using its own model, most likely a very small and inexpensive one.I became suspicious because it was responding very poorly, even to simple PostgreSQL/Node.js queries, which is not typical of GPT-5. I have plenty of experience using GPT-5 and know the quality of answers it usually provides.Has anyone else experienced the same issue?

freakynit · Accepted Answer

Following up: I asked same model name question directly to gpt-5 using ChatGPT, and it responsed properly:" I&rsquo;m GPT-5, the latest generation model from OpenAI. "

42lux · Answer

Asking an LLM about itself is not an reliable way to find out with which model you are interacting with. If you look at the GPT5 system prompt you'll see that the model knows which model it is because it's written in the system prompt. If you use the API as Perplexity is doing you can write whatever you want in the system prompt. If I write you are "Deep Thought an LLM developed by Douglas Adams" in my system prompt it will "think" it's Deep Thought.

begemotz · Answer

Anecdotally I have found that the quality of perplexity.ai has gone down significantly over the past year. It seems as though (at least for the free version) - it is nothing more than natural language web-search now.