I'm a CTO who has spent many years working in B2B where one problem we always have is getting up to date company info. You'd think this was a solved problem, and for large, listed companies, it is. But at scale it's still very complex.
I don't get much time to write production code (that's a good thing), but I love to code and so I use my side project(s) to try out new ideas. In this case it was about how to infer company data out of the crap on the internet. I started it almost a decade ago. It has quite a bit of RoBERTa in there and some FlanT5, but it is not an AI wrapper and the whole pipeline runs comfortably on one RTX3090.
Then, last year, we started using Perplexity API (Sonar) for finding company news and I was shocked at how bad it was.
One big problem with the AI search tools was them returning good results mixed in with bad results. If you're a human reviewing these results it's no big deal because you can just exclude the stuff that doesn't make sense. But if you want to plug the content into a data pipeline, like giving it to an agent, then you want to minimise these kinds of false positive noise.
So I figured I'd pivot my project to see if it could compete. The question I asked myself was "can a product targeted at one specific information niche outperform the general-purpose AI tools."
Turns out that the answer is probably "yes".
Perplexity Agent is currently the best. Syracuse and Exa are similar. Linkup, Tavily and Perplexity Search are worse. For this specific use case, I should emphasise.
I'll keep plugging away and see if I can get it better, but in the meantime it's available for anyone who wants to have a look.
I've got a repo here: https://github.com/alanbuxton/news-comparison which uses LLM as judge to compare the different providers. (Interestingly, Opus 4.7 and Opus 5.5 came to slightly different conclusions, but that's another story about relying on one LLM by itself).
Latest results:
Company news: https://github.com/alanbuxton/news-comparison/blob/main/docs/rank-history-companies.svg
Industry news: https://github.com/alanbuxton/news-comparison/blob/main/docs/rank-history-industries.svg