One of the clear advances with AI is in research. Instead of search engines, we now have answer engines–the benefit of which is getting answers to questions instead of having to comb a list of websites for them.
And, instead of clunky keyword searches, we now have natural language searches run by AI agents. (Media companies and owners of copyrighted content whose facts are used by AI answer engines complain that they are losing traffic to their websites, but we’ll put aside this controversy.)
Perplexity just launched a research agent to search U.S. patents. It looks pretty impressive: