Turns out, Comet Assistant hallucinated and entered completely wrong dates, later telling me that the dates I wanted were booked, but still wanted to have me complete the check-out anyways. I had to tell the AI agent that the dates were non-negotiable, and asked it to find another location. It ran into the same problem again.

AI agents that mess up key details like this are not new. My experience with OpenAI’s agent, Operator, and Perplexity’s previous shopping agent yielded similar results. Clearly, hallucinations stand in the way of these products becoming real tools. Until AI companies can solve them, AI agents will still be a novelty for complex tasks.

Nevertheless, Comet does seem to offer some new capabilities that may just give Perplexity a leg up over the competition in the modern browser wars.

Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser | TechCrunch

I don't recommend reading the article. There's really nothing of value other that Perplexity announces Comet and is available only for Max (those paying $200/month) users.

Wrt Comet itself, I will reserve any thoughts until I actually get a chance to use it. That said, I welcome any and all user agents into the mix. Whilst I do worry about intent when it comes to Perplexity and OpenAI, I will certainly give them a shot to determine what value they might bring to the web?

Of course, if they come with the intent to destroy the web at its core, I believe there are enough anti-bodies in the true web (not the google powered web) to survive almost anything.