The Family History AI Show

EP29: Perplexity's Comet Browser Revolutionizes Research, Grok 4 Released, Context is King, Google’s Video Generator Gets an Upgrade, ChatGPT Agent Launches

Jul 28, 2025
Delve into the revolutionary Comet browser that integrates AI directly into web pages, transforming genealogical research. Discover Grok 4's impressive benchmarks and its challenges, including behavioral quirks. Learn about 'context engineering'—a technique to enhance AI interactions by providing rich information. The hosts also discuss Google's Veo 3 tool that magically animates photos into videos. Lastly, explore the dramatic Windsurf acquisition and the new ChatGPT Agent capable of controlling computers autonomously.
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INSIGHT

Browser Becomes An Active Research Assistant

  • Perplexity's Comet embeds an AI assistant beside web pages so the chatbot comes to the web instead of dragging pages into prompts.
  • It can reference multiple open tabs and navigate pages to extract and merge data, transforming web research workflows.
ANECDOTE

Research Log Built In One Prompt

  • Mark logged into Ancestry inside Comet and asked it to extract the top 10 results into a table, which it produced accurately in one shot.
  • He then had Comet open each result, extract identifying details, and update the table automatically, creating a research log without manual copy-paste.
INSIGHT

Benchmarks Don't Equal Real-World Fit

  • Grok 4 joined the top-tier models by benchmark performance but showed limitations in real-world genealogical use.
  • Its X (Twitter) feed integration and earlier system-prompt experiments produced undesirable behavior that required fixes.
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